Why Manjaro?
Manjaro is the ideal linux distribution for those who wish to be on bleeding edge of technology while still having built in safety nets that its upstream distribution Arch does not have
My experience with Manjaro
I recently got sick of the buggy state of Windows 11 again and decided to give Manjaro a spin on my laptop (a Dell XPS 2 in 1). bellow are some some of my notes on my experience with it
Installation
The Install is as easy as Ubuntu and arguably easier then any RHEL distribution. A couple of highlights are:
- a Modern Design
- Simple and straight forward process to configure the necessary configuration
- Btrfs being natively supported is amazing while ext4 is still a suitable file system is is nice to see more and more distributions supporting copy on write file systems will allow us to push it forward and hopefully make it the standard
Day to Day Usage
The First few days
Honestly it was just nice being back on Linux again while I do enjoy using Windows as well there is something about the customizability of Linux that has always had me. This is likely in part to the ease of configuring it to meet my workflow whether it is development of IT support or writing for this very website. So far all the tools i use personally i have been able to continue to use on Manjaro although that may be in part due to me transitioning to more web based tools and away from proprietary software.
The First Week
I find myself reaching for my laptop more and more as I continue to work through a few ongoing development projects although i did run into my first issue so far and thats that i could not get my laptop to connect to my scanner although as I am writing this I just checked again and now it is connected and ready to scan. In Manjaro’s defense i didn’t spend long to trying to get it to work as i was in the middle of something i needed to finish in a timely manner.
Conclusion
Unfortunately my testing was cut short due to needing to prepare for my honeymoon and needing a rock solid PC with the ability to download Content from services such as Amazon prime or Netflix. I do plan on revisiting this at a later date as Manjaro does seem very promising as a Linux distribution that may actually be usable on the desktop.