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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • I gave it an actual try and it’s fine for intermediate users, but leaves much to desire out of the box for a regular person. No printer support out of the box… It’s disabled by default, gotta install cups and enable it manually through systemctl if you skip that in the installer. And of course, most people would. Bluetooth is also turned off by default (Systemctl again) Samba 's turned off by default (Systemctl and package installation again, as well as some extra steps in the terminal) and it of course didn’t come with a base Samba config file, which is required.

    Manjaro’s got a reputation and people love to hate it… But it doesn’t have those issues and aside from the cases where you would absolutely need it on the most user-friendly distros, you don’t need to ever touch the terminal on it. Pamac works really well, shows up as “Install and update programs” in the launch menus, supports native packages, AUR, Flatpak and Snap… and looks good to people who don’t get angry at the sight of a CSD window. I use the AUR fairly frequently and have encountered essentially zero cases where a package wouldn’t build on my system because of some Manjaro-specific issue in the past five years.

    Edit: And for the record, I would recommend PopOS for anyone looking to use a stable Linux computer with up to date drivers and no nonsense. Arch based distros are good for tinkerers and I’d only recommend them to people who like fixing things and want full control.



  • I’m sure EndeavourOS is perfectly fine for the people who work on it and their core user base. That’s not my issue. It’s still happily running on my laptop. I just keep on seeing people say “Don’t use Manjaro, use EndevourOS! It’s much better.” But your average computer user would lose their shit at having to deal with those ^ issues. “You just had to enable it at installation if you wanted printing. You didn’t see the checkbox?! Oh mah gaaa” …Seriously? It’s not a checkbox to turn it back on if you miss it and should be opt-out to begin with. Are you going to tell me CUPs is a significant memory/storage drain and a gaping vulnerability in a residential network? If one’s not familiar with Linux, CUPS, pacman and Systemd it’s a huge headache for most people to get this working.

    I just think that EndeavourOS shouldn’t be presented as a Manjaro alternative for your average person, when it’s an opinionated Arch-based distro with spotty defaults aimed at somewhat experienced Linux users that want nitty-gritty control over their system. (Users which, again, might as well be using vanilla Arch if that’s fun or important to them) And it has some weird update/mirror manager that prevented me from just using pacman to update my system at one point and I had to figure out whatever it was they wanted me to use. Never had this kind of crap happen to me in Manjaro. Nor was printing disabled by default. Nor were network shares hard to get working.


  • And in my case, I kinda don’t like Endeavour OS. I installed it on my laptop to try it out a couple months ago. It looked to me like a convenient no nonsense installer for Arch with some nice defaults, then you stumble on their custom update/mirror manager nonsense. Then you want to use a printer and realize they left CUPS disabled, as if to give you an “excuse” to use systemctl. Then if you want to use Samba, you need to go out of your way to find a default config file. I’ve had to jump through more hoops and dealt with more quirky nonsense than with Manjaro stable on that distro.

    It’s like it doesn’t know who this is meant for. People who want their hand held through a GUI for something basic as updating their system, or people who love writing their own config file for everything.

    Might as well install Arch, really.

    -Other happy Manjaro user





  • Honestly, I’ll think more than twice before buying that thing if it really just is a Switch refresh. Not even taking into account the fact that whether it’s Yuzu or not, it’ll probably be supported by a Switch emulator in a comically short time after coming out. I’m still waiting for some insider leaks ten years from now revealing the Switch was indeed just some rebranded gaming tablet. Too many half-assed features, both on the firmware/OS side of things, but also the controller connectivity and drifting. It’s their worst console up to now. But damn, are their games fun.







  • The norm is to download several 30, 60 or even 120GB updates afterwards. You then end up with an inconvenient DRM disc that has to be inserted for your game to run. When instead you could buy it online, download it just like you would’ve ended up doing and then never have to worry about damaging a Blu-ray disc.

    Don’t get me wrong, I love physical copies of games… But in the era of never ending updates, live service games, indie games, and games broken at launch, I definitely understand why most of us don’t prefer them anymore.





  • I don’t remember anyone mentioning Snap being closed source, but it receives many complaints for interfering with the functioning of common programs, on top of slowing down the execution of programs installed through it and is now being forced on users. I haven’t touched any *buntu distro in years, but it always seemed half-baked from the comments I keep on reading about it.

    Also yes, Flatpak is what I believe you could call a universal package manager. Package it once and it should run on any Linux distro since it takes most things out of the equation, save for the kernel and drivers. And yes, it mostly is used to distribute desktop applications. It’s ideal for safely running random applications or older programs that wouldn’t run through a modern runtime.


  • It’s not some miracle packaging system and while Flatpak-installed programs tend to start just as fast as native ones, I consider it inferior for most cases. Its two big advantages are that Flatpaks have a runtime they specify and depend on. It gets downloaded and installed automatically if missing when you install a Flatpak. So you’re much less likely to run into issues where a program won’t run on your system because of an incompatibility with a missing, or newer version of some library. Each Flatpak also gets installed in its own fake environment and is essentially a sandbox when you run the program. You can use a program named Flatseal to give each Flatpak access to specific directories or functionalities, or restrict it further. But the one big negative is that this runtime uses a lot of disk space. ~800MB per runtime.

    It tends to work really well and I’ve been told that years ago a guy would use this packaging system to bundle pirated windows games with a preconfigured version of wine, which made them run out of the box, with zero tinkering. On top of essentially being sandboxed and unable to access your real home folder, internet, camera or microphone. Just to illustrate its versatility. It also kind of already won the war when Steam Decks started using Flatpak as their main packaging system.


  • Nope, no thank you… I’m not touching anything other than native, AUR or Flatpak packages. AppImage has only been an inelegant and overall inferior alternative in my experience. The Windows experience, with Linux portability issues. “Find an installer online from some website, have it do whatever the hell it wants, polluting my home folder with random crap and hope it’s not a virus” with essentially zero advantages over Flatpak or even Snap.