I was perusing YouTube for distro reviews and saw this fellow explaining why he was switching from Ubuntu to Mandaro 16.08. Curious, I DL'd the 64b version, verified its sh1sum and created a guest OS of it on my VB installation. I installed it directly from the ISO without burning a LiveCD or LiveUSB. I gave it 2 core, 4GB of RAM and a 100GB VDI, of which 8 GB was SWAP. Manjaro is a rolling release, meaning that you are always on the front edge (not the bleeding edge) of software updates. Supposedly, you'll never have to reinstall from a point release again, although point releases are created as a means for new users (and re-installers) to install Manjaro for the first time.
During the first attempt at the install the graphic installer seem to freeze at the 26% mark. I opened ksysmonitor to see what was taking all the time. Immediately the installation program crashed with a complaint a kernel installation failure. I restarted the installation program but this time let it set on the 26%. After more than 5 minutes, it moved off of 26% and finished the installation. About 20-25 minutes. Rather then reboot, I shut the LiveISO down, removed the ISO from the virtual CDROM, and restarted it.
It took about 1 minute to reach the login prompt and another minute to present a desktop. For a plasma5 installation populated with lots of services that is just about right. The more services you've installed the longer the boot times for both the system and the desktop.
Octopii, which I have used before when I played around with Arch (which Manjaro is based on) was pulsating in the system tray, announcing that there were 268 packages ready to be updated. I left clicked on Octopii and was presented with the Octopii GUI for adding and removing packages. I selected the update option. It synced several repositories and then proceeded to do the update. Almost immediately it reported dependency errors and was forced to quit. Repeating the process brought the same results. Knowing that, in Kubuntu, when the GUI sometimes gives a failure the CLI does not. I resorted to using pacman as root, but it reported exactly the same errors. Catch-22. This installation could not be upgraded until the repository fixed their dependency errors.
I decided to browse around the installation to get an idea of what it could do. My first impression was that unlike Neon or Maui, The Manjaro desktop was ... ugly. It appeared to be a combination of Qt's graphic API mixed in with ASCII Art bits, although there wasn't really any ASCII graphics on the desktop. Of course, anyone who knows how to use KDE could customize the desktop however they wished rather quickly. When the various utilities were called up (Dolphin, SystemSettings5, etc...) they looked like the standard basic KDE utilities. Even the menu system looked standard.
I focused on the SystemSetting5 GUI, which tells me just how much of Plasma5 is active and ready to use. I saw the Systemd GUI, the good one, present and ran it. Nice. But it is NOT in Neon, yet. Then I noticed some services. xF86config?
I hadn't seen that video configuration package on any distro in years! Just like Kubuntu 16.04, Manjaro 16.08 was a combination of sysVinit services via Upstart, plus Systemd services. The /etc/init.d/ directory, just like Kubuntu's, was filled with Upstart/sysVinit scripts to start, stop, reload services. Neon has about 66 files in /etc/init.d/ and so does Manjaro. Sometime in the near future, for both distros will remove Upstart entirely and depend totally and only on Systemd. Conversions take time.
Besides the temporary inability to upgrade packages with either pacman or Octopii, the only compelling reason to use Manjaro (or Arch) is the rolling release feature, which I find is an insufficient reason. I like the idea of an LST release, especially for the 5 year model. In five years one can build up a lot of historical data and application cruft. Reinstalling from an LTS point release after a backup of all data, gives the distro a clean foundation. Also, 6 years is two computer generations. In two months my laptop will be a grandfather: 3rd generation. It's CPU thermal paste is drying out, the HD is losing reserve sectors, the letters are wearing off of the keys, and both the CPU and the GPU are too slow. If I weren't paying off two gigantic hospital bills this msg would be coming from a new System76 laptop with a 17" display, an i7 CPU, 16GB of RAM and an NVidia GPU with 8GB as the primary, and a 2TB HD. But at the earliest that's two years away. By then, 2019, both Kubuntu 1404 and 16.04 will be at EOL and we'll be ready for the next 5 year LTS.
Meanwhile, I'm upgrading Neon and I've deleted Manjaro's guest OS.
During the first attempt at the install the graphic installer seem to freeze at the 26% mark. I opened ksysmonitor to see what was taking all the time. Immediately the installation program crashed with a complaint a kernel installation failure. I restarted the installation program but this time let it set on the 26%. After more than 5 minutes, it moved off of 26% and finished the installation. About 20-25 minutes. Rather then reboot, I shut the LiveISO down, removed the ISO from the virtual CDROM, and restarted it.
It took about 1 minute to reach the login prompt and another minute to present a desktop. For a plasma5 installation populated with lots of services that is just about right. The more services you've installed the longer the boot times for both the system and the desktop.
Octopii, which I have used before when I played around with Arch (which Manjaro is based on) was pulsating in the system tray, announcing that there were 268 packages ready to be updated. I left clicked on Octopii and was presented with the Octopii GUI for adding and removing packages. I selected the update option. It synced several repositories and then proceeded to do the update. Almost immediately it reported dependency errors and was forced to quit. Repeating the process brought the same results. Knowing that, in Kubuntu, when the GUI sometimes gives a failure the CLI does not. I resorted to using pacman as root, but it reported exactly the same errors. Catch-22. This installation could not be upgraded until the repository fixed their dependency errors.
I decided to browse around the installation to get an idea of what it could do. My first impression was that unlike Neon or Maui, The Manjaro desktop was ... ugly. It appeared to be a combination of Qt's graphic API mixed in with ASCII Art bits, although there wasn't really any ASCII graphics on the desktop. Of course, anyone who knows how to use KDE could customize the desktop however they wished rather quickly. When the various utilities were called up (Dolphin, SystemSettings5, etc...) they looked like the standard basic KDE utilities. Even the menu system looked standard.
I focused on the SystemSetting5 GUI, which tells me just how much of Plasma5 is active and ready to use. I saw the Systemd GUI, the good one, present and ran it. Nice. But it is NOT in Neon, yet. Then I noticed some services. xF86config?
I hadn't seen that video configuration package on any distro in years! Just like Kubuntu 16.04, Manjaro 16.08 was a combination of sysVinit services via Upstart, plus Systemd services. The /etc/init.d/ directory, just like Kubuntu's, was filled with Upstart/sysVinit scripts to start, stop, reload services. Neon has about 66 files in /etc/init.d/ and so does Manjaro. Sometime in the near future, for both distros will remove Upstart entirely and depend totally and only on Systemd. Conversions take time.Besides the temporary inability to upgrade packages with either pacman or Octopii, the only compelling reason to use Manjaro (or Arch) is the rolling release feature, which I find is an insufficient reason. I like the idea of an LST release, especially for the 5 year model. In five years one can build up a lot of historical data and application cruft. Reinstalling from an LTS point release after a backup of all data, gives the distro a clean foundation. Also, 6 years is two computer generations. In two months my laptop will be a grandfather: 3rd generation. It's CPU thermal paste is drying out, the HD is losing reserve sectors, the letters are wearing off of the keys, and both the CPU and the GPU are too slow. If I weren't paying off two gigantic hospital bills this msg would be coming from a new System76 laptop with a 17" display, an i7 CPU, 16GB of RAM and an NVidia GPU with 8GB as the primary, and a 2TB HD. But at the earliest that's two years away. By then, 2019, both Kubuntu 1404 and 16.04 will be at EOL and we'll be ready for the next 5 year LTS.
Meanwhile, I'm upgrading Neon and I've deleted Manjaro's guest OS.
I agree.
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