Manjaro Cinnamon 0.8.10

I started using Manjaro Cinnamon 0.8.10, this morning, October 18^th 2014. The installation was a breeze using Manjaro's installer. It resembles the one Ubuntu uses, with a few minor differences. One of the things I don't like about it, is that it doesn't ID my location automatically. No biggie. On the other hand, it has an option which permits me to see my password when I'm keying it in. I like that. And the installation was fast.

I have two 120 Gig SSDs in my box on which I run Cinnamon and KDE. The install for both DEs went flawlessly, which is what I am accustomed to with every Manjaro desktop I tried. Manjaro has supported GPT and EFI since 0.8.8, if I'm not mistaken, so using EFI boot and GPT on my SSDs was no problem. Their wiki explains GPT & EFI, and how and why to use them on install, so I won't go into it here.

After the roughly 15 minutes it me took to install Cinnamon (Windows users, eat your hearts out), I rebooted to my brand new desktop. One reboot after installation is all it took and I was ready to work. What a change from my old Windows days, when half-a-dozen reboots were not uncommon, plus the endless and huge updates. OY!

Once I had installed Cinnamon and rebooted, I was given a choice to update the system with service pack 11, which I promptly tried to do, but there was a hitch: I couldn't download one of the encryption keys, which prevented me from updating the system. Hey, I never said Manjaro was perfect. But five minuted later, after consulting the Manjaro forum, I had the solution, which I then easily implemented. Success!

The Cinnamon desktop is simple and uncluttered, so that your work flow should be made easy. Unlike the Gnome shell, which I like by-the-way, Cinnamon is free of fancy-shmancy doohickeys to interrupt, or add to, your work flow. This can be important if you have work to do on your Linux box.

Whereas the Gnome shell is pretty and modern, getting work done takes a few more clicks and that might annoy some folks who use their boxes for work, rather than play. I love playing with Linux, but some folks use Linux for business and they don't have time for that. This is a good distro for them to try in order to get out from under the claws of Microsoft and their costly license fees. But I digress.

I'm not trying to say you can't get work done on the Gnome shell; just that it's more easily done on desktops like Cinnamon or KDE, for example. When it comes to work, I'm ol' school; when it comes to playing with a DE, I like the more modern look and feel of Gnome shell, which I very much prefer to Ubuntu's Unity. I don't like the Unity dash/shell, but I have to say that someone in the Manjaro community—I've forgotten his name, and I don't feel like hunting for it—has put together a Unity version of Manjaro which is quite nice. But I still prefer the Gnome shell over Unity any day.

I found Cinnamon to be a bit heavy, my resource monitor indicating 1.1 Gig of memory used while running Firefox with two tabs open, LibreOffice writer 4.2.6.3 and the system monitor running. That's not bad really when you consider that's it's still pretty snappy for a DE that size. When I closed Firefox, my memory use went down from 1.1 Gb to just over 720 Mb. Try that with Windows 7, 8 or 8.1, unless you've spent hours tweaking them to within an inch of their lives. Tweaking Cinnamon to run lighter should be a breeze compared to Windows.

The assortment of software is quite good, although curiously, there was no calculator included. Go figure! There's the usual office fare, such as LibreOffice, which I very much like using; some good system tools like the Manjaro Setting Manager; the Cinnamon system settings; system monitor, gparted, as well as gedit and the Gnome-Terminal (AKA the dark place); the Files (AKA Nemo/Nautilus) file manager; 7Zip FM, as well as file-roller, and a host of others too numerous to name here.

Oddly, the GIMP wasn't included, perhaps for iso size consideration, and the aforementioned calculator. All-in-all, there's a good assortment of software included with Cinnamon, and downloading more is quite easily accomplished with one of the most powerful package tools in the Linux world: pacman.

There are two options I know of for using the GUI side of Pacman: Pamac, based on GTK, or Octopi, based on the Qt. Both are splendid GUI package tools and easy to use. If you prefer, as I do, using the CLI, then Pacman will delight you with its flexibility and power.

As for the looks of Manjaro Cinnamon, there are a combination of Adwaita, the plain white flat look associated with the Gnome shell, which I dislike, or there is an Adwaita dark or light look—I prefer the light look—or Greenbird, or Numix-Manjaro, or the very ugly High Contrast look, if your stomach can hack it. Otherwise, head over to gnome-look.org and the choices are practically unlimited.

This is by no means an extensive review of Cinnamon, but one which I hope will make you curious enough to try this distro, or any of the many others in the Manjaro arsenal. The flavors range from XFCE, Gnome, KDE, Openbox, to Enlightenment, Fluxbox, PekWM, MATE, LXQT, LXDE and a couple of minimal install media that should have it covered for you.

As stated above, the devs at Manjaro are good people, ready to help you out with any problem, and so is a very fine community of users; yours truly included if I can. You can also consult the Manjaro wiki, or the very extensive wiki at the Arch-Linux website.

I will be adding to this blog as time goes by while I'm using Manjaro Cinnamon. I'll try to be fair and just, despite the fact that I'm biased in favor of this distro and the folks that make it up and use it.