Re: Manjaro Xfce 32 Bits
Chris Troupe
Well, well. It is time to expand our horizons. That means more distro testing. In particular, Ishall continue exploring the Manjaro 18.X range. The Plasma version turned out to be a pretty solid,colorful release. It wasn't perfect, and there were quite a few hardware-related issues with my oldNvidia-powered Pavilion dv6 laptop. But then, there were also tons of unique goodies that convinced meto persevere.
Now (meaning when this article was written, a few weeks back), I want to check the Xfce edition, andsee how it fares on my eight-boot G50 laptop, running Windows 10 and a whole crop of different Linuxdistros, complete with UEFI/GPT and Intel graphics. This is similar to what I've done with Manjaro 17Hakoila, having tested both the Plasma and Xfce builds. So we begin.
The system booted fine. The desktop looks polished, featuring a gray-green theme with reasonablefont contrast, and a well-arranged layout. Some of the system area icons could have a wee bettercontrast, and the desktop icons text shouldn't be truncated, but those are small worries. All in all,this is a very pleasant, elegant workspace.
In Thunar, I noticed some of the old woes - Devices before Places, you can't change that, and theterminal is too transparent by default. The Ark theming works well, but for prolonged use, there arebetter ergonomic choices - plenty of options available with the distro, though.
It's always interesting to compare how different desktops do the same thing, and it almost alwayshighlights the discrepancies and inconsistencies in the the distro behavior. Read my Plasma reviewfirst, please, and then compare. With this Xfce build + G50 platform: Wireless, good, Bluetooth, alsogood - but the pairing using the desktop wizard did not work. Instead, it worked by initiating thepairing from the phone, and the actual Bluetooth management tool looks so 1996. Samba sharing requiredthe same tweaks (the extra package), and it took forever to start (the first attempt failed, the secondworked). Then, after that, Samba speed was really fast, go figure. Printing: lovely jubbly of thebox.
There were no issues getting the phones recognized and mounted - except Thunar shows them withserial numbers, which I found somewhat ugly. Media playback worked without any problems, you getAudacious for music by default, and VLC for video (but you can associate everything with VLC if youlike).
Now, this is a curious one - we'll talk more about this after the installation. I did need the Sambapackage, and I wanted to check the GUI tool. No Octopi! You get Pamac instead. This is a sharpdivergence from the Plasma experience. This also means you can enable AUR right away, there's bettervisual integration (Gtk), plus you have two command-line utilities, both pamac and pacman, which can beconfusing. Then, there's a menu entry called Run Pamac, which did nothing. But going via Add/RemoveSoftware did get the right program launched.
There were more inconsistencies here. It took a while for the installer to load modules, about 110seconds, but okay. Then, you don't get partition labels the way as with the Plasma version. The setupwas also decidedly longer, about 60-70 minutes. The disk was quite hot in the end. It might be the GRUBsetup, or similar, not sure. When selecting partitions, I did manually choose /boot/efi, because thiscaused problems in the past. Not sure if this has been sorted out, but I didn't want to risk it,especially since I've done two Plasma installations of Illyria just recently.
The slides are still blurry AND they mention Octopi, but you don't get this tool here, so there'sdefinitely an element of something either being outdated or not right or both. I think more QA isneeded, and tighter alignment between these different flavors.
The desktop installed fine. The boot sequence isn't clean. The startups are quiet and posh, but theshutdowns come with scrolling lines of text informing me about this or that service. The Wirelesscredentials were not saved from the live session.
This was rather tricky, so at least the two flavors share this in common. Like I said, no Octopi.Then, I wanted to change my desktop layout - top panel plus dock, and so I powered Pamac to search forsoftware. As it turns out, there was the same backlog worth 1.1 GB of updates. And Pamac wouldn't letme install individual packages, it wanted me to grab all these updates, too.
On the command line, pacman let me do things as I wanted, so this is kind of annoying. Moreover,there was a warning on some dependency cycle thing, and even though Manjaro was able to fix this on itsown, it creates a sense of unease. Why would a user ever be told about something like this, especiallyif they have merely started the package manager and only tried to install an innocent, unrelated pieceof software.
Eventually, the updates worked fine - it took a while, but the process completed successfully,similar to what we've seen with the Plasma edition. 400 packages, 1.1GB worth of data, not bad. Theupdates also fixed several bugs with applications, as we shall see shortly.
Manjaro Xfce also weighs 2.2 GB, much like the Plasma version. The software collection is decent.Firefox, Thunderbird, LibreOffice rather than Calligra here, Microsoft Office Online, two media players, and then some.But this wasn't all smooth sailing. Much like we've seen int he first review, Skype Online won't workdue to unsupported browser error.
Steam wouldn't work either - missing 32-bit libs, which I found no way of replenishing manually.During the update, though, Pamac removed steam-native and replaced it with steam-manjaro, which works.But this is a clunky fix, and it's a problem that shouldn't have happened in the first place.
Not easy. I had similar issues to what I've encountered in Ubuntu MATE. Plank installed finebut would crash every single time I tried to drag 'n' drop icons to rearrange them. So this is a no-go.Docky isn't available anymore, and I had to resort to Cairo Dock, which is fairly complex - we shallhave a separate article slash guide on this one in the future. It took me quite a while gettingeverything sorted out nicely, and even then, I wasn't really happy.
No global menu is available by default, so that's another snag. There was a horizontal line acrossthe bottom of the desktop, which you can remove by disabling shadows in the Compositor settings. Weird.Some of the windows had weird element clashes, and in a couple of places, toggles and slidersoverlapped with text.
On the ergonomic side, I found out the theme to be a bit exhausting after a while, because itdoesn't have enough separation between active elements and background. This is modern and flat, butit's also less visually effective than say what Plasma does.
Eventually, I got what I wanted, but it took me several hours to tweak the system to my liking, andeven then, it still wasn't a complete one, because I had no global menu. Moreover, Microsoft OfficeOnline icons wouldn't integrate into Cairo Dock. This could be the dock issue, but this also affectedPlasma and its icons-only task manager, so I'm not sure.
Another ergonomic doo-doo was: missing icons in the system menu. I can understand if the icon issuesI encountered with my previous install was due to the fact I've reused the old account - but then, theissue only manifests for Breeze and Breath (default), not for Papirus, so that's weird. Here, this wasa brand new, clean install, so the missing bits and pieces are an eye sore.
No issues on this machine. Suspend & resume worked fine. All the Fn buttons do their magic. Thetouchpad was a little bit jittery, but that's about it. The system was also stable, and there were noweird errors on any kind.
Very solid. CPU ticks 0% when you're not doing much, and the memory footprint on idle is about 480MB, more or less like Plasma. It's funny that the Manjaro official page lists its KDE flavor as "heavy"- but it is comparable and sometimes even better than Xfce, and it's definitely much lighter and fasterthan Gnome, especially on older hardware. Ah well.
The laptop's cell currently holds 64% of its original capacity, so this means whatever we see on thescreen, we need to add 50% (do the math, it works). With little activity and brightness set to half themax value, Manjaro Illyria Xfce offered about 160 minutes of juice. This means a new battery would giveabout 4 hours, which is quite commendable, and similar to some of the other nice-performance distros onthis machine, including the likes of KDE neon, MX Linux - and also the resident Windows 10 system.
One curious thing is, if you go into the power manager, brightness reduction, there are twosliders under Reduce after - and I'm not sure why. Is this a glitch? Two levels ofbrightness? Why is it then possible to overlap them or switch their positions?
Overall, Manjaro 18.0.4 Illyria Xfce is a decent distro. It has lots of good and unique points.Network, media and phone support is good. You get a colorful repertoire of high-quality programs, theperformance and battery life are excellent, and the desktop is fairly pretty. The system was also quiterobust and stable.
But then, there were issues - including inconsistent behavior compared to the Plasma crop. Theinstallation can be a bit friendlier (as Plasma one does). The package management remains the Achilles'Heel of this distro. Having too many frontends is confusing, and none of them do a great job. Themessages on dependencies, the need for AUR (if you want fancy stuff), and such all create unnecessaryconfusion. There were also tons of visual papercuts, and I struggled getting things in order. All inall, Manjaro is getting better all the time, but it is still too geeky for the common person, as itbreaks the fourth wall of nerdiness too often. 7/10, and I hope it can sort itself out and continue todeliver the unique, fun stuff that gets sidelined by the rough edges.
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