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Comment by smokey_circles | Hacker News Reader

Tangential question:

I've used both Manjaro and Arch and Manjaro is far away my favorite distribution, because (to me at least) it's Arch for the lazy.

I ran Arch for years before Manjaro and so maybe that's the reason, but I don't believe Manjaro abstracts you away from nuts and bolts layer as much as Ubuntu does?

INB4 the ubuntu comment: I know, I know. You can still do a lot of fiddling under the hood, it's just not in a manner i'd describe as "the linux way". There are a lot of helper layers that break if you try to subvert them, but i will admit that update-alternatives is the only example coming to mind now

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Debian is Arch for the lazy. It's also Arch for the professional who understands the pitfalls of the "rolling" release model.

That's a bold claim considering Homebrew has been wildly successful on Mac & been doing the whole rolling release thing the entire time. Everything in the world is tradeoffs so I can also say "Arch is for the professional who understands the pitfalls of random OS distro updates/patches to upstream packages that don't get updated for years".

I'm likely too young to fully appreciate that sentiment, but fair enough!

Yeah, I remember Arch breaking systems completely back when they moved the entire /bin and /lib, setting python3 as the default python, etc. Took hours of fucking around to fix.

I'm a tinkerer typically, but it seemed like they were going out of their way to break things and generate maintenance work for me, I've never had that issue with any other distro and I will never run Arch again because of it.

I recently spent some time evaluating a bunch of different systems for migrating away from Ubuntu, including several Arch-based ones.

I was the most impressed with Manjaro, it seems very well polished. From Gnome 40 on Wayland, to the the default ZFS shell with custom Powerline prompt, to the GUI desktop layout switcher which even includes the tiling PoP Shell as an option.

The Manjaro team has done an excellent job at assembling a configuration that is simultaneously power-user-focused but also user-friendly.

Absolutely!

I just wish there'd be some more love on architect.

But maybe I need to learn more about the default installer, I couldn't get it to run on LVM and/or LUKS

The default installer offers an option to encrypt the disk, meaning LUKS + LVM. (iirc, LUKS requires LVM, but correct me if I'm wrong).

The only main shortcoming of the installer is, in 2021 it really needs to also offer btrfs as an option for automatic installation. Basically four options for automatic install: Ext4, btrfs, LUKS+Ext4, and LUKS+btrfs.

Having recently migrated to ZFS, and quickly become accustomed to the immense flexibility of datasets/subvolumes, snapshotting, and checksumming, I can't imagine using anything other than ZFS or btrfs now. And btrfs is standard on Fedora 34 and Garuda, probably some other distros too.

I definitely agree with you. Manjaro is a great distro and I have used for multiple years. I especially liked that they offer such a broad range of supported desktop environments, each with their own downloadable ISO image.

If you are looking for something that's closer to pure Arch under the hood, your should give Endeavour OS [0] a try. It's basically vanilla Arch with a nicely configured XFCE desktop and a graphical installer.

[0]: https://endeavouros.com/

>to the the default ZFS shell

Correction: ZSH shell.

> [Ubuntu] You can still do a lot of fiddling under the hood, it's just not in a manner i'd describe as "the linux way".

I use and like Ubuntu, but I have to agree with this. Even before I finished reading this paragraph I was thinking of update-alternatives. Networking config springs to mind as well for me.

If you want the Linux-way, nuts-and-bolts Slackware is where it's at. Slackware and Void Linux were my favorite distros. These days I'm just using Ubuntu for plug-and-play convenience.

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