On 23.12.2021 at 23:37, 1667p1 scribbled:
> Recommended to try - EndeavourOS.
Personally I prefer Manjaro, and not just because I happen to be a
moderator at the Manjaro forum. :p
I do however have contact with some of the EndeavourOS people — I was
added as an advisor to the Telegram group for the Calamares developers,
and that group contains people from just about every Arch derivative
you can think of. Some of the EndeavourOS people are also former
Manjaro developers/contributors.
> A nicely-done Arch-based distro. Very snappy in a KVM
> machine too.
One of the advantages of Manjaro over EndeavourOS — at least, in my
opinion, but tastes and preferences do differ — is that Manjaro is a
curated rolling release, not just "a" rolling release. This means that
when it comes to the Manjaro Stable branch, the software is tested
longer and bundled together. You rarely get updates to individual
packages in between the major updates — it does happen, but it's rare.
> The standard ISO only offers XFCE - but the online
> installation (an option offered, if you have a
> fairly fast connection) lets you install any of the
> popular desktops. I picked LXDE, as usual.
Manjaro started off with XFCE only, but in the meantime, KDE Plasma and
GNOME have been added as official releases, and in addition to those
three, there are also a bunch of community releases, created by
individual team members in their own time. These include...
- LXDE
- LXQt
- Cinnamon
- MATE
- Budgie
- Deepin Desktop Environment
- UKUI
- OpenBox
- i3
- awesome
- bspwm
On top of that, there are also several spins, but those are usually
just based upon one of the above editions, but set up with different
defaults, perhaps a different choice of preinstalled packages, and
different artwork. The spins are created by community members.
There are yet a couple of other user interfaces — such as Sway — but
that's because Manjaro also has a commercial partnership with the
makers of the Pinephone and ARM64-powered Pinebook.
> One of my only complaints about Arch-based distros
> is that to get at any of the good stuff you have to
> manually bring in the AUR repo. At this point that
> should be just automatic.
That used to be the case in Manjaro, but the Manjaro developers — or
for that matter, the EndeavourOS developers, or the developers
of any other Arch-based distribution, including Arch itself —
cannot possibly vouch for the security and reliability of the software
in the AUR.
The AUR is a community platform, and this platform HAS in the past
already been abused for trying to get people into downloading malicious
software — trojans, et al. Therefore, and considering the enormous
amount of absolutely clueless newbies we're getting over at the forum
every day, makes the enabling of the AUR in the package manager an
irresponsible decision.
> I found Octopi the best Synaptic substitute.
Manjaro has Pamac, which comes with both a GUI and a command-line
interface, and it does have AUR support if enabled. Personally I never
use its GUI because I find it unintuitive, but it's pretty good as a
command-line package manager. The GUI is written in GTK, but there was
also a Qt-based version, albeit that its development is still lagging
behind on that of the GTK version.
Most of the time however I will use pacman, which is command-line-only
and has no AUR support, but it's robust. And if I have to look up on a
package because of some problems that a newbie has at the forum, then
I'll use Octopi, which unlike the Pamac GUI IS very intuitive to use.
> There is also tkPacMan, but out of the box it doesn't seem
> to see the AUR repos.
If I recall correctly, then Octopi has no access to the AUR either
unless you install an AUR helper like yay or trizen.
> Some urinate on GUI package managers but there are SO many apps these
> days that it's really really nice to be able to search by keywords
> and get a note about what they're all about and all the dependencies.
Correct, and that's the kind of thing that I would use Octopi for. For
actually installing software however, I prefer the command line, and
from a character-mode tty, while completely logged out of Plasma — which
is the desktop environment I use, albeit that I've completely
customized mine, so that it doesn't even remotely look like the stock
Plasma install anymore.
I prefer installing and updating via the character-mode console and
logged out of the GUI because then all of the shared libraries used by
the GUI will have been closed, which allows me to remount my /boot,
/boot/efi, /usr, /usr/local and /opt filesystems read-only again after
installing/updating — I normally have those read-only during normal
operation.
Of course, if it 's a big update, then I don't need to remount them,
because then the kernel will have been updated as well, and then I have
to reboot anyway. I also manually TRIM them after updating, installing
or removing software, because the weekly TRIM only handles
read/write-mounted filesystems. But that's just MY setup, and
therefore, that's my choice.
The above all said, I do think it's cool that Arch-based distributions
are getting a little more publicity around these parts. With all of
the .deb- and .rpm-based violence going round these last decades, one
would start thinking there's nothing else anymore than Ubuntu, Mint and
Fedora. ;)
--
With respect,
= Aragorn =