I will make this as brief as possible. I am overcome with a sense of gratitude for the developers and others who make Manjaro possible. One reason is that for the past several months I have blamed Manjaro for my inability to get a certain package to compile (on AUR): the entangle photo capture tool. For years, installation has been automatic, then, all of a sudden, the build started to fail. Just this past week, I have installed different GNU/Linux distributions at least 7 times, on two machines, none of whichâin the final analysisâsatisfactorily replaces Manjaro. This has been going on a while. EndeavourOS was able to compile this program ok, so I relied upon it for some months. Then at some point, something broek; the website for EndeavourOS has been down for days, so could not access any help. So I tried CachyOS; probably in the future it will work out, I really like it, but for now, my Nvidia GTX 1050 card will not work at least with HDMI, from a successful installation. Back to Manjaro: the one problem that persists is that the kernel of Manjaro does not support the USB Wifi dongle I need to connect; the same is true of at least one other distro I tried. Then I decided to do it the (sort of) hard way, with Archlinuxâs archinstall script; but between my failed diligence and the clunky (IMHO) partitioning module of this script, I managed to delete a decades old collection of work that I had not backed upâexcept for bits and pieces, and, as it turns out that script actually gives a warning that the partition will be wipedâbut the user is given too little opportunity to customize the âmanualâ paritioning mode. So I wasted days trying to access a lost partition using testdisk and so on, but since it was wiped, it is gone. I give up. I found this out after an install of Manjaro and inability again to compile entangle from AUR, when I just installed Archlinux to a single partition. But the install is spartan, and i saw visions of weeks of vertigo and wasted time, trying to tweak the system to usefulness. This was my desk top.
Meanwhile my aging Thinkpad Yoga was also a victim of my own restlessness and poor attention, when I managed to use dd (appropriately named by some as âdisk destroyerâ) to overwrite the SSD of the machine. Luckily, some partitions on this machine were accessible, and I have saved some work.
That was two in one, on a single day.
The chain of installations on the laptop went like this: manjaro â ubuntu (nice but fiddly, and unfamiliar) . Entangle installed on Ubuntu. So I was starting to think, âmaybe itâs worth the troubleâ. I had i3 workingâa blessing on an older laptop, 100%âand I could manage, begrudgingly; but too many tools were not available on the repos.
Last night, on about day 5, I had installed Arch from the script, but, again, I longed for the ease and familiarity of Manjaro.
Then I finally went to the website of Entangle, and saw a message that the preferred method of installation would be flatpak. This, worked. on the Archlinux desktop.
Long story, many words, resolved. I was wrong to blame Manjaro. I still would prefer to use Archlinux repos. Maybe Iâll figure that out. The important tool Entangle is now working.
It has taken me about an hour to get this Manjaro (on the Thinkpad) into rough shape.
Thank you. I intend to write some documentation to bring the excellence (and pitfalls) of this distribution to others.
Iâm lovinâ it.
Installed via Flatpak on Arch - it worked. Realized the issue wasnât ManjaroâŚ
