Hi all! I’m brand new to Manjaro coming from Debian based distros, all looks great but when I hover over top left for activities I don’t get a search box (as I do with Gnome under other distros), I have to trawl through the apps list to find what I want to run. Is this something I can just switch on and if so, where is it?
Welcome to the forum!
It would be more helpful if you were to at least tell us what desktop environment you’re using. 
Hi, thanks for the response; I thought it was clear that I was running Gnome so apologies if it wasn’t apparent. I’ve installed Manjaro 21.2rc1 if that helps.
Hovering is not enough. Click on Activities or press the Super (Windows) Key to open the Activities Overview. Then use the search box at the top of that screen to find and launch applications.
Check if you have gnome-search-tool installed. If not, you can install it with… 
pamac install gnome-search-tool
… or…
sudo pacman -S gnome-search-tool
Disclaimer: I don’t use GNOME, so if you already have that package installed, then I’m sure it would be merely a matter of going through the settings in order to enable the search function you are used to.
Check if you have dash to dock enabled and if you want use the search gnome box you need to disable dash to dock… dash to dock disable this gnome feature but the search function works always also if you don t see the box…
Whether the search box is hidden or not, you can just start typing to search. 
That’s an old, obsolete package that is no longer part of GNOME, FYI.
It’s not Dash to Dock that does that, it’s Gnome 4x UI Improvements. It’s Hide Search option is enabled by defaut.
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