Any computer operating system - will need the user to have some degree of knowledge or is willing to learn the necessary tasks.
You can use Manjaro without being a tech - the problems can generally speaking - be boxed in as
Nvidia graphical issues - which Manjaro has very little say in - closed source drivers
Tweaking and customizing your desktop
using incompatible widgets (KDE)
using themes from random sources which is incomplete (requiring user intervention to work)
using incomplete themes
using incompatible shell extensions (Gnome)
AUR packages
AUR packages will often require the user to rebuild after an update
Insisting on adding packages to the system without doing a full system sync.
So when you decide to stray your system from the default release - you cannot blame Manjaro - and you shouldn’t - as what ever modifications you make to defaults are yours - they are your decision - they are your responsibility.
You cannot blame Manjaro if the changes you make to your system is causing issues.
If you run an unmodified Manjaro system - then you will have an 99% chance of never experiencing issues.
From my own experience - the only time my system has ever been broken - is because of my own ignorance or stupidity and a complete lack of understanding of the consequence of a given action - and I can be really stupid and do stupid things - however - never blame the distribution - blame yourself - blame your lack of knowledge - and use the opportunity to learn.
Failure is the greatest teacher - if you learn from it.
For desktop use and desktop workloads, you don’t need any maintenance or filesystem knowledge.
Perhaps the only service to be done monthly is “scrub”.
I have been using btrfs for many years, I have no monthly maintenance, I have never encountered any problems.
You must o by default with these mount options: “noatime,compress:zstd:1,autodefrag”.
Dal wiki Btrfs https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/FAQ#Do_I_need_to_run_a_balance_regularly.3F:
Do I need to run a balance regularly?
In general usage, no. A full unfiltered balance typically takes a long time, and will rewrite huge amounts of data unnecessarily. You may wish to run a balance on metadata only (see Balance_Filters) if you find you have very large amounts of metadata space allocated but unused, but this should be a last resort. At some point, this kind of clean-up will be made an automatic background process.
The benefits and flexibility of Btrfs far outweighs those of ext4.
Oh. Thanks(?) for your reply but the general philosophy from the hacker communities and the views you have- and write so strongly about, gets to be olllld. As is the reasoning behind the bibles that you cant help but see all the time such as How To Ask Questions The Smart Way or slash7 with Amy Hoy » Blog Archive » Help Vampires: A Spotter’s Guide or others alike…
really, truly, im bored to death of the subject so ill just stop here , actually…¯_(ツ)_/¯
but anyhow, the reason i say such a thing in the first place is because at least 100% of the people that have tried stock, un-changed manajro that I know, myself being the most linux-ok of them included, have had just around 100% chance of having issues- including and excluding your round-up of common ones
well what i meant about maintenance would be more on the user side, rather than the computer side. I rather like btrfs over ext4. And f2fs for smaller drives
Would personally prefer BTRFS to be the default file system for Manjaro once the existing bugs are patched. Garuda already defaults to BTRFS, and the CoW functionality is just really convenient.
Installed Manjaro with btrfs using the architect installer inside Manjaro 20.2.1 iso…working great… (Except some problem with timeshift. Snapper is working perfectly)
By changing ‘defaultFileSystemType’ to btrfs in /usr/share/calamares/modules/partition.conf u can use Manjaro installer to easily install Manjaro with btrfs. The installer would use btrfs by default. Tried with Manjaro 21.0.3 Gnome iso, worked great.
Could you elaborate?
I am using BTRFS for 2 years now. Manjaro configures it nicely by default and even installs Timeshift for snapshot backups and automatically creates a snapshot before updates.
There is nothing else to do.
Actually I would say BTRFS is the most user friendly filesystem since it allows easy backups fully automatically.
Ext4 requires quite some user actions to reach the same level of ease.
This itself has been a contention for those who do not want to dig their heels into snapshots and/or Timeshift backups when updating their systems.
One could argue that “user-friendly” is something that “just works” and hits peak performance for writes and reads. Ext4 and XFS out-perform Btrfs, especially for modifications and writes, and work quite well even on low-end machines. (For example, Ext4 and XFS, with LUKS encryption, shows no noticeable bottleneck nor slowdowns on my Intel Atom with 2GB of RAM.)
How? If you’re referring to Timeshift, it’s the same level of setup. It might not be as efficient as block-based snapshots, but configuring it is trivial: select a device, optionally select a schedule, and you’re done.
Furthermore, besides snapshots, no desktop user is really taking advantage of Btrfs’ other features. You need to configure it with redundant devices if you want it to auto-repair data corruption (from a known good source) and safeguard against bit rot. (Using it on a single physical drive makes those unique features a moot point.)
There are also reports of uncanny issues with Btrfs that make even myself tentative on fully committing to it for reliability and long-term integrity (and migratibility), especially of irreplaceable data.
As much as I love ZFS (which I believe is the “best” overall file-system / solution), I would never argue for it to be a default for any desktop Linux distro, regardless of its “legal” grey areas.
Ext4 works the best for the largest chunk of users, while XFS and F2FS provide comparable performance, especially on SSDs, give or take. Leaving Btrfs as an option satisfies all users: those who purposefully want to use its features and snapshots can easily make that selection during installation, while everyone else can comfortably leave it at the default of Ext4.
(Except some problem with timeshift. Snapper is working perfectly)
