Proposal: An optional "Resilient Profile" during installation

Feedback Feature Request
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Proposal: An Optional “Resilient Profile” During Installation

Hello everyone,

I hope you’ll read this message in the constructive spirit in which it is intended.

I’ve been using Manjaro since 2016, both personally and professionally, and I simply wanted to share an idea that came to me after almost ten years of daily use.

First of all, thank you to everyone involved in this amazing project.

Over the years, I’ve recommended Manjaro to friends, colleagues and many people discovering Linux because, in my opinion, it offers one of the best desktop experiences available today.

I’m not a developer, so this isn’t a technical proposal or a feature request in the strict sense. It’s simply a reflection from a long-time user who genuinely cares about the future of the project.

Why I’m sharing this

After using Manjaro every day for nearly ten years, I’ve come to trust its reliability.

My suggestion is therefore not about making Manjaro more reliable.

Instead, it’s about making that reliability more visible and immediately accessible through technologies that are already widely recognised in professional IT environments.

I believe this could help even more people discover what many long-time users already know: Manjaro is a dependable operating system.

A possible idea

Rather than changing the current installation process, what if Calamares offered two installation profiles?

Standard Profile

Exactly the excellent experience we have today.

Resilient Profile

An optional profile focused on security, resilience and recovery.

Its goal wouldn’t be to change Manjaro’s philosophy, but simply to provide a ready-to-use configuration for users who want additional protection.

For example, it could include:

  • Full-disk encryption (LUKS)
  • Btrfs
  • Automatic filesystem snapshots
  • Simple rollback capabilities
  • Carefully chosen default settings designed around resilience

The exact technical implementation would naturally be up to the developers.

Why I think this matters

Many users, especially newcomers, professionals, schools, non-profit organisations and small businesses, are looking for more than performance.

They’re looking for confidence.

Being able to recover quickly after an unexpected issue is often just as important as avoiding the issue itself.

A dedicated Resilient Profile could make these capabilities immediately available without changing anything for users who prefer the traditional installation.

Looking ahead

Over the past few years, several Linux projects have shown that technologies such as filesystem snapshots, rollback capabilities and stronger update validation can significantly increase user confidence, especially on rolling-release systems.

Perhaps Manjaro could continue reinforcing its already excellent reputation by making these concepts easier to access through an optional installation profile.

I also wonder whether continuing to strengthen automated validation before updates reach the Stable branch could further increase the confidence that users already place in Manjaro.

Final thoughts

This is simply an idea from someone who has happily trusted Manjaro every day, both personally and professionally, for almost ten years.

Whether or not such a profile is ever implemented, I mainly wanted to express my gratitude to the developers and the whole community.

Thank you for creating a distribution that has allowed so many people—including me—to enjoy Linux with confidence for so many years.

I’d genuinely be interested to hear what both the developers and the community think about this idea.

Thank you for taking the time to read it.

Best regards,

A grateful Manjaro user since 2016

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There is an idea to make an immutable variant of the distro, it was tested. If it will see the light of the day is hard to say because there are more pressing issues, but thoughts are made in this direction.

It will probably mean change of the underlying technology though. The combo btrfs+encryption+snapshots doesn’t exactly equal to simple rollback, recovery, management and fixing if something breaks.

3

Welcome to the forum! :vulcan_salute:

Full-disk encryption has nothing to do with resilience, and is also only really useful on laptops.

The other things you are proposing here are already the default in recent installation media. As of Manjaro 25.0 Zetar, we have begun making btrfs the default, along with automated timeshiftsnapshots by way of a pacman hook, and grub-btrfs for booting into those snapshots.

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Off topic question, but did you use AI to help you write that? I’ve noticed on various forums similarly structured posts, it’s very corporate/generic that AI excels at. I’m doubting it’s a coincidence.

6

Thank you very much for your explanation.

That’s actually excellent news, and I must admit I wasn’t aware that these features had already become the default in the latest installation media.

It is reassuring to see that Manjaro is already moving in this direction.

You’re also right about LUKS. I was thinking more broadly about a profile combining both resilience and data protection, particularly for professional environments, rather than resilience alone.

It seems my proposal was partly based on features that are already being implemented, which is actually very encouraging.

Thank you again for taking the time to explain this.

That’s a fair question. :blush:

Yes, I used ChatGPT to help me improve my English and organize my thoughts.

The ideas are entirely mine, based on almost ten years of using Manjaro both personally and professionally. Since English isn’t my native language, I used AI as a writing assistant to make my message clearer and easier to read.

I hope the discussion focuses more on the idea itself than on the tool I used to express it.

Mod edit: Consecutive posts merged.
If there are no intervening replies, please edit your previous post instead to add further information. Cheers! :wink:

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I was just asking out of curiosity. Doesn’t bother me that you used it. :+1:

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This appears to be an AI ‘wishful thinking’ type prompt, which typically ends up offering suggestions which have no relation to reality.

Reading the post gives me a sense of cognitive dissonance, as if I’m transported to a parallel universe…

I understand your good intent.

We must be realistic about what Manjaro is, the state of it’s development… and the fact that it already has tools to achieve much of what users need to achieve (BTRFS, snapshots etc).

I agree with you, and I believe Phil also does believe what most of us feel when we deal with NEW users especially. The current model for most distributions is getting OLD.

AerynOS is a glimpse of what might be a new kind of distribution which would answer most of your wishes - but not for quite a while yet.