Manjaro: A Convenient Way To Play With Arch Linux

The Manjaro Linux distribution describes itself as a "user-friendly" version of the popular Arch Linux platform. Manjaro Linux still follows Arch in a rolling-release manner, but it's designed to offer greater user-friendliness and accessbility, complete with an easy installation routine.

Beyond having an easy-to-use GUI installer, Manjaro is available in 32-bit and 64-bit flavors and also comes in spins for Mate, LXDE, KDE, and Xfce. Two weeks ago marked the Manjaro 0.8.5 release and then released last week were the MATE/LXDE/KDE desktop flavors to Manjaro 0.8.5. Being curious about this Arch-based distribution, I fired it up on a test system today.

Using the Xfce flavor of Manjaro was very easy-to-use from the LiveCD through the GUI-driven installer. It only took a few minutes to install and was a quicker setup than running with a virgin Arch Linux installation.

One of the reasons why Arch Linux isn't commonly used for benchmarking at Phoronix is that it's more time-intensive to setup than quickly running through an Ubuntu, Fedora, and other popular tier-one distributions with timed fixed releases, which is important when carrying out new Linux OS installations on a near daily basis. The lack of a "fixed point" to easily make it easy and turnkey for others to compare our Linux benchmark results against with a matching software stack is another challenge for the rolling-release distributions.

Anyhow, the Manjaro 0.8.5 release was very easy and straightforward:

After carrying out the easy Manjaro Linux installation and upgrading the system using Arch's pacman, it was off to the races. While our ARM Linux benchmarks and 64-bit Arch Linux benchmark comparison in the past have revealed little performance advantage to Arch over other tier-one Linux distributions -- contrary to popular belief that Arch and Gentoo are magically much faster on the very latest hardware -- benchmarks of Manjaro 0.8.5 compared to other Linux distributions is being carried out right now. Stay tuned to the results on Phoronix in the coming days.

For those wishing to learn more about Manjaro Linux or to give it a try, visit Manjaro.org.