Review: Manjaro Linux 24.0
Quoting: DistroWatch.com: Put the fun back into computing. Use Linux, BSD. —
My trial with Manjaro this week was a mixed experience, full of some glorious good moments and some disappointing errors. Clearly the inability of the software manager to perform any tasks was the worst issue I ran into. This problem was made all the more puzzling since other desktop applications authenticated properly, the pacman command like package manager worked, and I was able to confirm my password was typed correctly.
There were a few other annoyances, though no serious problems. The default command line aliases, terminal colours, and shell that kept asking if I was making typos were unwelcome, but harmless. I was able to change these in a few minutes and move on. Having the project advertise the desktop cube and include the necessary dependencies only to not have it work in either session (X11 or Wayland) was also disappointing.
Now for the good parts: I really like how easy it is to install Manjaro. The Calamares system installer, the friendly welcome screen, and the variety of editions means Manjaro is quickly and easily accessible. We can pick a full featured or light edition and get it up and running in a few minutes. I like that we can pretty much click "Next" a few times in the installer and have a working system, but we can also customize partitions and the office suite.
Plasma 6 is working fairly well on Manjaro. It's still a little rough (the desktop panel kept jumping up and down during my trial) and Wayland was unusually sluggish when running in a virtual machine. The X11 session was snappy though in VirtualBox and both sessions worked well on my laptop.
Where Manjaro shines, I think, is automating a lot of things for the user. Manjaro's parent, Arch Linux, is famous for requiring a lot of manual work. Manjaro keeps the rolling nature and flexibility of Arch while automating all of the low-level work. The initial set up is easy, Flatpak support is ready to go out of the box, hardware and shortcut keys are all handled for us.
Manjaro also does a nice job of supplying some applications for basic tasks without overfilling the application menu. The distribution should be easy enough for beginners to use (the problems I encountered aside) while providing enough flexibility and tools to appeal to more experienced Linux users.
My favourite feature of this distribution is probably Timeshift combined with boot environments. I like being able to revert changes, especially on a rolling release distribution. Manjaro is one of just a few Linux distributions to enable boot environments and automated Btrfs snapshots and it's great to see this available.
There are some problems in this release, but I suspect nothing which cannot be overcome with a few tweaks or a future update. This feels like a solid, and powerful distribution that is easy to get up and running.