I've used linux distros for a variety of tasks in the past but am finally committed to moving my primary machine to it. This is mostly used for games, writing, development, and web browsing. I've selected Manjaro as my distro.
Anyone have any tips or suggestions? Software to install. Things to keep in mind. Cool things to do you couldn't on windows?!
:tux:
IMO Manjaro is a newbie trap. I don't know why it gets recommended, maybe the default color scheme looks nice, but I feel like people disproportionately have problems with it. And not just the historical "set your clock dates back because we forgot to renew our certs" sort of problems. There are better rolling release options, from Arch itself or other Arch spinoffs like EndeavourOS, or OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.
If you're a Linux novice I don't think I'd even suggest a rolling release, but I can imagine it's a lot of fun if you're dedicated to maintenance to get the latest packages quickly.
Make sure to enable the aur for pamac. You can use the app store thing's preferences settings to enable the aur. Its super useful for downloading stuff that isn't in the manjaro or arch repos. I'd highly recommend downloading the microsoft font package, command would be sudo pamac install ttf-ms-fonts. Manjaro by default comes with timeshift which is a cool piece of software that creates pseudo backups of system settings and such. Libreoffice is the best linux experience for office software, but there are also a million latex editors. If you are using kde plasma as the de then it would probably make sense to go with kde's editor. If you use discord at all, I would highly highly recommend the discord_arch_electron package which makes it so you don't have to deal with the very bad native linux updates for discord. For games you'll want lutris, its big selling point is that it has a number of autoconfigure scripts. Firefox is the obvious choice for browser on linux. If you are using a wide screen (16:9) I'd recommend looking into removing the taskbar amd replacing it with the tree style tabs extension.
Good suggestions. Some of this I already have or planed on getting but hadn't heard of enabling aur or tree style tabs. That is very intriguing to me as I do have a wide monitor.
I love it, for web content height is so important, so making that shift ended up adding an extra boost. What desktop are you using?
Plasma includrs a program called krunner that you can activate by pressing Lshift and space. It allows you search for programs and things quickly. I'd recommend the firefox addon that adds krunner integration as well as the calculator for krunner so you can do simple math quickly.
Just a warning, if you want to avoid Linux burnout I suggest switching to Ubuntu/Fedora/Pop!_OS or similar. I have been all the way around, using Arch Linux, Gentoo, and NixOS, but then I settled on Pop!_OS and it has been very low-maintenance so far. I especially recommend it if you have a dual intel/nvidia laptop and/or you do gaming. Granted, if you are willing to make the commitment, these more advanced distros can be rewarding, but for someone making their first commitment to Linux, I would suggest starting with something lower maintenance.
Pop was enticing. It was basically my second choice so I may well give it a go as well.
Just curious, what do you mean by maintenance? What are the the maintenance tasks that are required for them?
Edit so I'm seeing manjaro and arch in the same sentence a lot so I am guessing you are basically building and maintaining the entire machine from scratch as it were?
When I say maintenance with respect to Arch Linux, I mean ensuring that all pieces of your system which you personally chose continue to function together without issue e.g., configuring display drivers (especially relevant with dual intel/nvidia), PulseAudio/Pipewire, laptop power management, and generally dealing with applications that do not officially support Arch Linux if they break. Manjaro (if I recall correctly) removes the task of putting the system together yourself, but it will still require more knowledge to maintain and troubleshoot than most Ubuntu derivatives. This doesn't mean that it's a bad choice, or even necessarily that it's a bad choice for new users, but if switching you should nevertheless keep it in mind.
Keep your dual boot for niche things but revel in never needing it.
Tips for Manjaro, familiarize yourself with Arch Wiki, its an amazing resource for more things than just arch, but particularly useful since manjaro has the arch base.
Biggest tip? Just learning to phrase a google query right to find your answer quick.
edit: Ricing is fun and teaches you things but rest assured it will eventually get boring. I like to focus more on a simple setup that gets out of my way. But going overboard on customization is a lot of fun, then your next install you know what you want/use and what you don't
I'm a little evil and have been hanging out in windows a lot the last 6 months or so, but it was originally for an embedded project I was working on, then a DAW I was using, then I got lazy and my ubuntu install is on a spinning disk and my arch install on an ssd has barely anything installed not for programming so I just kept installing games in windows.
Since I'm fucking with computers all day anyway, I rarely want to do actual computing at home and mostly just use my desktop for games so it really didn't matter to me.
But I fell off the wagon and started playing war thunder again and my good flight stick config is on ubuntu so i'm back baby.
Yeah, if i'm just browsing I've got my thinkpad with arch and i3 installed so most of the time I'm in a native linux world.
I have the X201 with an i7, but I don't use it. It always ran pretty warm with the fan humming, but now it'll shut itself off from overheating under moderate-heavy workloads. I tried to disassemble it to reapply thermal paste but this particular model is kind of a mess to get into, and I ended up breaking some of the plastic on the chassis instead during my attempt to take out the keyboard.
I think the x230 with the keyboard mod is the sweet spot for this "old" style thinkpad, but I never owned one :(
I keep around an R50 from 2004 that still says IBM on it for fun. Its got a big 4:3 display and the keyboard light and lasts a couple hours on battery life, but it has a 32 bit processor so it dual boots debian and windows XP. Its nice to play with occasionally or bring to a LAN party for broodwar but I never got into the real thinkpad hobby.
I've got a 4th gen X1 carbon that I adore due to how light it is and how long the battery lasts. The keyboard is also stiffer than other thinkpads of the era so its nice to type on. its like 5 years old at this point and hasn't shown any sign of age yet. Thinkpads are neat because they're built so well they usually outlast their usefulness by a big margin, leaving you with a machine that isn't useful for much anymore.
I bought this guy new on a really good black friday sale and thought ahead and spec'd it to be future proof and so far its working out. I skimped on the SSD thinking I'd upgrade it later but never needed to.
I don't think I'll need a new personal laptop for another 5 years or so, but I'm secretly hoping we get a crossover episode between the M1 Macbook air and the Carbon. I recently had to replace my wive's 9 year old macbook pro and after considering our options, we found a deal on the first iteration of the M1 air and grabbed it. I was very surprised how nice it was and despite daily heavy use, she charges it once every three days. If I could have a trackpoint + 20 hour battery life and nice linux hardware support I'd be pretty happy.
I find it really nice to stay on the keyboard for minor adjustments of the mouse, or for browsing where you hold middle click with your thumb to scroll.
I should check out the pinebook again, I really don't need a computer though so it'd just be a toy for me mostly.
That's the plan. Windows for random games that aren't working in linux or are already setup on windows and saves don't port or something.
Make sure you actually want Manjaro. People selecting the wrong distro can lead them to having a bad experience.
Only use Arch/Manjaro if you already enjoy the command line, fixing things, and reading documentation, because you're gonna learn 80% of Linux admin skills using it. Personally, I like this trial-by-fire route like this so that I can learn the system, but I also know that the vast majority of people do not like to do so at all. Not even a little. It makes them annoyed and frustrated. If you're getting annoyed and frustrated with your experience, consider not using Manjaro as your first daily driver.
If you want an easy transition, use an LTS release of Ubuntu. This has its own downsides (you should remove snap and install flatpak) of course, but it has the advantages of being popular and grandparent-friendly.
Definitely a good tip. I personally love command line and documentation. I have ubuntu running on a server and it's pleasant but I wanted more fine control on daily driver.
I'd set up the home folder on a different partition - that way if you want to wipe the OS you can preserve your stuff without needing to store it somewhere else.
Right now I have a ssd partitioned in 2. One boots Linux and one still boots windows 10. I also have 2 hdd that are setup in RAID that I use as main storage.
There's a way to set the home folder actually to the hdd? Also as far as I can tell Manjaro sees the disks as 2 separate disks not configured for raid so I'll have to figure that out.
RAID 1. Was feeling redundant when I built this machine. Probably didn't need it but hey I guess that's the point. Don't need it until you do.
I'm not too familiar with RAID setups but yep, once you've sorted that bit you can do it post install, or alternately set it up during the installation process, which is a little bit easier.
Hm well I didn't do it during install but if it's significantly easier I could just as easily reinstall as I've done little customization yet.
Perfect. This looks like what I need. Must be software Raid but I built this years ago and I have a bad habit of building, putting the cover on the case, and then totally forgetting what's happening in there.
I played around in BIOS earlier today and found no RAID settings so it must be windows.
If you're moving to a rolling release like Manjaro, make sure you update frequently. Would be best to get familiar with pacman, particularly to blacklist and rollback certain updates just in case, and check the arch front page regularly. I really like rolling release distros and wouldn't use any other distros for personal computing, but I have a somewhat tight control of what packages I have and stuff still breaks though nothing major. After years of using arch I've manage to fix everything except a conky update which wrecked it, rolling back saved my workflow.
Oh and yeah modifying the UI aka ricing is pretty cool on Linux. I grew weary of it after I lost all my configs on an hdd failure so I mostly stick to KDE, but I had a pretty sweet i3 setup previously. If you have time to spare and don't mind breaking stuff, I suggest you explore different DEs or try to setup a minimal environment with just a window manager, see how it goes for you.
I've got KDE plasma for the moment. Enjoying it. Have tried gnome and cinnamon before. May with free time experiment because a minimal environment could be fun. But not a huge priority
Interesting. I'll have to check it out. I had heard some good things about pamac so I'll have to do some more reading.
That sounds like a a great script to have working.
As far as visual mods ya I got a setup that looks nice and isn't obtrusive. I may play with it a bit but it's not the focus.
Space isn't an issue (Hoping to get about 20TB of unused cheap drives soon). I doubt I'll distro hop much but it's possible if I feel like trying different flavors.
ssh clients
ncdu to show how full your stuff is
eog to look at images
vlc/ totem to look at videos
some matrix client
imagemagick it got lots of uses
python3, ipython3 or junyper notebook things
baobab to look at how big files on the system is
blueman to better work with bluetooth things
pavucontrol for kinda neat sound management
jq, something like grep but for json
git if you must for source control
tmux if you want to ever do console based multiple windows gedit, nano, vim or emacs for editing files on servers
