Regular readers can pretty much ignore this one. We’ll be back to cartoons, O’s baseball and the usual inanity soon, tomorrow in fact. I just wanted to revisit my dedication to Linux, prompted by a recent mixed bag of experiences that left me feeling even more positive about a relative newcomer to the distro scene: Manjaro.
It all started a few days ago, when I decided to finally try to update the eight remaining Linux installs on my main desktop PC. I’ve been using Linux Mint (18.1 Cinnamon) as my daily driver for several months, originally in an attempt to keep my bandwidth usage to a reasonable level, and then due to inertia/lack of issues. I could have gone with my trusty Debian stable install, my go-to for years up till then, but I guess I was just getting bored.
Anyway, I set about updating most of these, which had sat dormant for eight months or so. This is often a crapshoot, and I knew from the start that it was bound to be so, but I had some free gigabytes to burn and went for it. Sadly, only three of the eight worked.
The worst offenders were openSUSE Tumbleweed, Arch, and Debian Sid (unstable branch), all of which updated fine but then presented me with either no wireless connection or no graphical login upon rebooting, just text based terminals, or in openSUSE’s case, no internet despite being able to connect. Since I’m no expert, not having the X-Windows environment and network manager’s easy connection thingie meant that text console was a dead end. In other words, if I wasn’t such a dummy I could probably fix things.
Another possible monkeywrench thrown into this whole deal was the proprietary nvidia graphics drivers. I frankly couldn’t remember if they were installed on the various distros, or if so, how. I did try fixing that part of things after the fact, but without success; errors compiling the module. This was it for me. I know when I’m beat.
No biggie though. I pressed on, with a certain dogged confidence that Manjaro might just work, despite its being based on the dreaded Arch, a lovely distro but known to actively resist hand-holding or any other acquiescence to non-geek ease of use. And sure enough, with almost no issues at all, Manjaro updated itself neatly, cleanly (sorta, as we’ll see), and booted back up into an even faster and prettier version of itself (this was the KDE version too!). Muy bien.
The only even partially geeky things I did were to answer yes or no to a few package replacements (names had changed), updated the archlinux-keyring package first, and ultimately had to use the –force option in pacman, not recommended but necessary because I got a slew of “such-and-such file exists” errors. Yeah, I know… pretty unintuitive, and geek-ish, but nowhere near as arcane as some of the steps I tried to get the uncooperative other distros to fix themselves. This was a success!
I should mention at this point that I didn’t even try to update two of the candidates, Fedora and PCLinuxOS, mainly because Fedora was a few versions old anyway and the PCLinuxOS install was already broken (I think it was a beta of the plasma 5 version). No sense in wasting hundreds of megabytes on that malarkey. Maybe I’ll reinstall those fresh at some point.
I should add that Debian stable also updated itself without issue, with nothing close to the level of geekery needed to get Manjaro back to loveliness. It may be woefully out of date and boring, but if I had to recommend a distro for someone and was able to install it for ‘em (that can be a bit much for the uninitiated), I’d go with the old reliable Debian stable. I have in fact done this for more than a few people. It just plain works for the most part, though little paper-cut-y kinds of things like updating the flash player can be difficult.
And of course, Mint itself is always an awesome choice for the newbie Linux convert, perhaps the best place to start. It’s simplicity itself to install, everything works immediately, and it doesn’t gobble up the gigabytes like so many of its competitors do. It’s even reasonably up to date when it comes to things like browsers and other apps.
But Manjaro! I’ve never been anything less than impressed with this distro, since I first tried it years ago as a beta right up to now. It’s the Mint of the Arch Linux distrosphere, making installation and maintenance a piece of cake, so long as you don’t wait several months between updates.
How do I know this? Because I’ve had the Xfce version on my laptop for years now, updating religiously, with nary a single issue. It’s as easy as Mint with regular care and feeding, but it will suck up some gigabytes. The upside is that you’ll always be very close to the bleeding edge in terms of everything from apps to kernels to infrastructure. Best of all though, it just plain doesn’t break!
So kudos to the Manjaro team, those brave individuals that take Arch packages and tame 'em into something amazingly close to Debian stability, no small task (not that Arch itself doesn’t work well too if updated more regularly and not borked by a dumb user like yours truly). Manjaro takes all of the pain and suffering out of being a geek!
Or at least pretending to be one. I mean, I’ve been using Linux for almost a decade now, haven’t had a copy of Windows anything on either of my machines for over a year, and I still don’t consider myself to be anything more than a novice. If I were a true geek, I’d have been able to get the others working. Even I don’t have that kind of time. It’s baseball season after all!
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Link to past posts, faster than the top-right icon thingie: https://disqus.com/home/forum/claudecatsplace/recent/
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