Hi. I’m new to this forum, but also an experienced Linux user. I started in 2003 with openSUSE. Right now I have 10 operational Linux systems installed on my hard disk. Manjaro is the latest addition … I just got it running last night. I selected the KDE desktop, because I like it.
The installation went fairly well, with a few exceptions. The installer died unexpectedly before it allowed me to create a root password and a user account. And it didn’t install grub to the /boot/efi partition. It died shortly after I had asked it to install a proprietary NVIDIA driver. It did install the driver OK … it looked as if it had tried to invoke the new video driver from the installer itself, and couldn’t make that happen. (The screen went dark all of a sudden, and never came back. I suppose the script kept on running, but I couldn’t talk to it.)
Since I was sure the new system was mostly there, I booted up Gentoo and ran grub-mkconfig (aka update-grub), then booted into Manjaro. It booted up quickly, but there was no user defined at the sddm login screen. And it wouldn’t let me log in as root because there was no root password defined.
I decided to try to rescue the system. I booted from a recovery USB stick and did a chroot into the Manjaro root partition, then used “passwd” to create a root password. When I rebooted from the hard disk I was able to login as root (there were no other users defined, so sddm let me supply a username) – KDE came up, I used the “settings” module to add a user account, and “nano” to patch the /etc/sudoers file. I also ran grub-install and grub-mkconfig so that Manjaro has its own grub startup option in the BIOS. Now Manjaro boots up just fine.
I do have one question. Should I report this as a bug in the installer? I’m involved with the KDE project pretty deeply (I have commit access to the KDE Gitlab), so I have learned that some distros don’t really want to be bothered with hard to reproduce problems. Just thought I’d ask for some advice here at the forum.
I really like Manjaro, even if it does use systemd. 
It boots very quickly, and the default theme looks nice. Kudos to the package creators! Now I get to learn about pacman, I suppose.
David Bryant
Canyon Lake, Texas
https://davidcbryant.net
