What is a difference between Full and Minimal installation?

Non-technical Questions
1

I’m a long time Manjaro user. (and old forum too :cry:)

I do my Manjaro installs with Architect. Usually KDE or XFCE.
I always chose minimal installation and when a package it’s being installed.
I want to help my family member with Manjaro installation. Is there something she could miss if I’ll install minimal version? I know that office suite, internet browser and maybe something else is going to be “must have” but I’m wondering about any possible problems like incompatibility.
Are there any hardware limitations in minimal installation? Any drivers missing?
Any services are disabled by default or in this area minimal and full install are the same?

Is minimal install + internet browser equal to full install - every package except internet browser?

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2

Minimal version has fewer default applications. See differences for KDE, Gnome and XFCE – packages with “>” aren’t included in minimal iso. Of course you can install these packages through pamac later if you need :wink:

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I’m absolutely aware that there are more packages in Full installation. I have countless Manjaro installs on my account :slight_smile:
I use pacman and pikaur only :wink:

This question arrived because I would like to know if there are differences other than number of applications installed. Differences that can show up after some time of use.

4

In minimal you don’t have snap, flatpak and appimage. Also you don’t have printer support by default. No office suite, lesser apps for multimedia and lesser plugins for your DE. Appearance is the same.

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5

I don’t think there would be. I didn’t know Manjaro now has a minimal iso but I’ve seen other distros like gentoo do the same thing. All it means is that you’re only getting the packages that you need to run the operating system and possibly your environment and that’s it. So for example if it’s as minimal as I am thinking you will have to install LibreOffice if you want it.

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6

As I said. It’s not my first install. Application differences are not important to me.

It has minimal ISOs for a long time.

And could you tell me if support can be enabled by installing cups and enabling appropriate service or do I have to do something more?

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As far as your question about the printer driver I would imagine you need to install the driver yourself. I don’t know if cups does that for you I’ve done it manually from the terminal before because I couldn’t figure out how to get cups to work. I can’t paste because I’m not at my computer right now but look up printers in the arch wiki it will tell you what driver to install for your printer.

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I have marked the solution because thats the answer
All corresponding profiles for packages and configs can be found at the gitlab.
There arent any further differences - you use the same branch, the same repos, get the same updates, etc.
Just a smaller package base. (not all packages are ‘applications’ as such)

In the example of the printer stuff - ‘minimal kde’ doesnt include manjaro-printer and gtk3-print-backends so you may or may not want to add that yourself.

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9

For some editions, minimal edition is very different. For example, Bspwm-minimal has only terminal applications included, no compositing and uses even less ram. But for most editions, they are mostly the same with some components left out:

  • Printing support
  • Snap
  • Flatpak
  • Extra themes
  • Fully featured browser (firefox/chromium might be replaced with something minimal like falkon or epiphany or links)
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