About Manjaro Linux

Some of you will have noticed that the subject of this blog has changed dramatically; it used to be about religion, specifically Christianity, but I've lost much of my interest in this subject in the past few months, and have decided to change the focus of this blog. Having said that, I know turn my attention to the primary subject, i.e., Manjaro Linux.

This Linux distribution (distro from now on) originated with three young men, as far as I know: Roland Singer, Guillaume Benoit & Philip Müller. These gentlemen, I believe, all hail from Europe, though I welcome being corrected if I'm wrong.

I used to be a big fan of the Ubuntu family of Linux distros, but try as I might, I could never get the scanner on my printer to work properly. As well, being a Xubuntu user, because I liked XFCE, I often noticed system crashes that had to be duly reported. It was annoying to say the least.

Then, one day, I happened to be surfing Distrowatch and noticed this distro: Manjaro. The principle desktop environments were XFCE, Openbox & KDE. Being somewhat of a distro whore, I decided I would try this Arch-based distro. I had read a bit about Arch, a Canadian distro with a good reputation among those who are not afraid to get their hands dirty, so to speak, using the command line, AKA, the Dark Place.

I downloaded Manjaro XFCE (variously pronounced "man-jaro" with a hard "J", or man-haro, with a soft "J"), and installed it. It was a refreshing change. Manjaro XFCE was snappy, well endowed with various apps. At first, I didn't much like their colour scheme, but have grown to like it since.

Here, at long last, was a distro that was suited from me. Everything worked, even my printer's scanner! Of course, I had to do a little command line (CLI) work, but nothing very daunting. I went to Arch's wiki, type "Brother DCP-7030" in the search box, went to the indicated wiki page, followed its instructions.

Not only did my printer work, but my scanner worked flawlessly the very first time I tried it. I can't tell you what a joy I felt to finally be able to scan an image with an OS that wasn't Windows.

I had tried many different distros, but could not get my scanner to work properly, or even get the exact driver from my DCP-7030, but with Arch's wiki and Manjaro, I got everything working.

After that, I knew I could get rid of my dependence on Windows, which I did in very short order. I am now a full-time Linux user.

I've tried every flavour of Manjaro's salad mix of desktop environments and my favourites boil down to these two: Cinnamon and KDE. I can't make up my mind which of these two is the best. I love them both fort different reasons. My next blog will be about Cinnamon, which I will test during the coming week, and then KDE, which I will also test.

One last work: the Manjaro dev team are simply great. I've found them to be helpful and friendly, not to mention hard-working. The Community as a whole is also very helpful and friendly. I've run into a few minor problems with Manjaro, as will happen with any OS, and the help was there every time.

Personally, and this is my opinion, not something written in stone: I think Manjaro Linux is the best distro out there, bar none. My thanks to the dev team and Manjaro community for finally giving me a Linux home.

18-Oct-2014