Manjaro or Netrunner?

[allenskd]

Before I start:

Like always I plan to stick to KDE. One of the reasons I want to make the jump right now is because Jessie isn't quite there yet in terms of stability. It's stable but I ran into some broken packages which is expected, unexpectedly some cosmetic packages are broken making some KDM themes not have their images.

Now. As a Debian guy going to arch what should I know? Also, Brother (company) who produces quite a lot of printers have provided *.rpm and *.deb packages of said printers. Is there a way I could "convert" those packages to Arch? I really need my printer, haha.

I have the CUPS wrapper although I know the installer download these files:

$ ls mfc*.deb
mfcj435wcupswrapper-3.0.0-1a.i386.deb mfcj435wlpr-3.0.1-1a.i386.deb
mfcj435wcupswrapper-3.0.0-1.i386.deb mfcj435wlpr-3.0.1-1.i386.deb

And download some 32-bit packages from Debian repos (gcc, multilib stuff)

Netrunner feels like a very strong candidate for me, mostly because it has a polished KDE experience. Manjaro I tried to use the Live CD and that thing won't even get into KDE Session. Lastly, I might fallback to OpenSUSE and try to keep my hatred of YAST GUI away so I can be objective about it. (Time to use Zypper!)

Lastly, I just want to try a different system for a while. I'll be falling back to Debian mostly because of how strong I feel about it. I like the new KDE 4.13.x versions so I won't be falling back to Debian Wheezy, rather pointless since Nepomuk is a stinky pile of crap. Plus my experience with baloo has been rather pleasant

 

[allenskd]

You know... I want to scratch off Manjaro now. I burned it two times. I could never get it to work on my desktop, it didn't even work on Virtual Box... I fear that leaving my data in the hands of Manjaro installer might be an error. Arch is pretty straightforward with the installation as it's just creating a folder in /mnt called home then mounting my sda7 which contains my home partition then generate the fstab... Thing about Arch is that future system breaks. In terms of installation weirdly I feel more confident as the commands I write is what I meant (as in I understand what they do).

I'm still downloading OpenSUSE and now Arch Linux setup to install on my virtual box.

 

[Kladiator]

Hi allenskd,
I am really surprised Manjaro didn't work for you.
I am an Ubuntu User, but I tried Manjaro Openbox on 2 different machines (64 and 32bit, both with Nvidia cards), and every time I was stunned how easy and fast I was able to set up everything, although I did notice some annoying tearing watching some HD videos (but I have the same problem with Openbox on Ubuntu).

I even tested KDE on the older of the 2 PCs and I really liked the experience, even if KDE is my least favorite Desktop Enviroment (can't explain why).

I really never liked Opensuse, but I am interest to know your opinion on Arch.

 

[allenskd]

My best take on Manjaro is that its installer is too immature.

(oh-my-zsh warnings)

Arch? Give me a week and I'll put more feedback into. I haven't used Arch in years so I'll give you my first impressions.

1. Installation

Super straightforward. No real problems with mounting my previous /home data. I mean, there's not much to add on the installation. I formatted the partitions I needed and mounted the ones I had in /mnt.

2. KDE installation has been smooth, yet there was some awkward "configuration loss" I had to reconfigure from scratch.

3. MPD works out of the box. (I had a bad streak with the Debian mpd one...)

4. Printer installation was hell, but I did it manually.

5. Everything works.
KDE works as expected. No weird behavior has been sighted. The only problems I have ran into has been not having the packages installed, mind you Arch Linux has a different package name, but I know more or less what I need. Steam works, and most of my local WINE games work, like Triple Town.

KDE is still wonky, mostly because of kwin effects.

I'm going to stick with Arch for a while. Setting a whole OS from scratch drains me completely.

 

[Daerandin]

Hey, I've been very quiet lately but I've had more than enough to deal with. Now I will likely have more time to be more active here again.

Interesting to hear you giving Arch a try. Arch requires a bit of maintenance, but as long as it's kept up to date and you always watch the output during updates and deal with anything that might come up immediately then things should be going smoothly. Also, read the front page news frequently because it does happen that updates require manual intervention, and the front page news are where you can read what to do when this is required.

Use the wiki, I mean really use it. Even when installing something you are very familiar with, still read the wiki because Arch might provide a smaller base install for something than what you are used to and certain packages are optional in Arch while coming automatically in different distros. Almost every piece of software in Arch got its own detailed wiki page.

When it comes to stability, I've been running Arch now for over a year and a half now. The only issue I've ever had (that I didn't cause) was something that eventually turned out to be a kernel bug specifically related to certain nvidia cards. I have mentioned this before, I had my computer actually dying when I was starting x. It only happened on specific kernels and I had to boot with a couple of specific kernel parameters to run normally. But the nvidia devs found the problem eventually and submitted a patch to the kernel git, which was accepted.

As for my self caused issues, I didn't watch the output when updating when I was new to Arch, several .pacnew files were piling up on my system. When I eventually had gotten around to read about them on the wiki, I tried merging the .pacnew files with appropriate config files, but I was still too new to Arch and Linux generally to really know what I was doing. I broke my system without knowing how to fix it. I ended up on Ubuntu for a month after that while I was reading the Arch wiki daily until I realized what I did to break my system.

If a package is not in the official repos, I suggest searching the AUR. But I do not suggest using a AUR helper to build the packages automatically since the only quality control on AUR is from other users. I use cower, which can check for updated packages in the AUR and also download updates atomically, but you still need to build the package yourself with makepkg so you can check the PKGBUILD.

A little tip if you'd like better looking fonts, read the wiki page on Infinality

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Infinality

I use the unofficial repo for these packages and it really improves the look of the fonts.

After sticking with Arch this long, I think the best advice I can give is that you need to enjoy maintaining your own system. This is what is keeping me with Arch, it has become a hobby for me and I enjoy it a lot.

 

[allenskd]

Hey, Daerandin

I'll be sure to add the front news to my RSS feed reader. I don't really feel overwhelmed by Arch Linux, infact I feel quite comfortable. The only problem that sucked like 2 hours from me was getting X to start on Arch Linux + Virtual Box . I had to install the virtualbox guest utils Arch repos offer else X was never going to start.

Installation went practically smooth as I've done my fair of chrooting when I was programming Jester in the past Honestly I thought it was going to be harder... I'm glad I've grown in different ways.

Some observations I've made during my time using it (like 6 hours?). Arch multilib feels better than Debian, maybe it's just me.

AUR has plenty of awesome packages, I'm literally playing a PS2 game right now (Radiata Stories). Got me some fresh pcsx2-git from AUR. It's pretty refreshing not having to get the debian packages to compile.

Even without using Arch I've always read up their wiki It's pretty neat and lot of useful information there. Honestly I won't be distro hopping anytime soon, it just takes so long to set up everything. :/ As for merging pac files I'm pretty aware about it, I'm waiting till pacman tells me there's an update so I can practice a bit.

 

[Daerandin]

Yes that is required, because otherwise there is no graphical drivers installed. I'd suggest installing by following the beginners guide instead of the more basic install guide, mainly because it reminds you of a lot of stuff you might forget yourself.

I also really like the way they handle multilib, just enable the repo if you want to be able to run 32-bit apps, and install the required libs.

When it comes to emulators, there are emulators in the official repos for all nintendo consoles as well as PS1 and PS2.

When it comes to the AUR, I really suggest building the packages yourself with makepkg. Using a AUR helper that does it automatically prevents you from checking the PKGBUILD first, to ensure the package is not malicious. Although I do use cower (from the AUR) which will check if your AUR packages have updates available, and can also download the updated PKGBUILD automatically if it has been updated. cower does not build anything, so you still need to do that yourself, which in my opinion is the ideal way to handle AUR packages. For convenience, run makepkg -irs

-i installs is with pacman -U after it has been built. -s installs any required dependencies, and -r removes all make depends after you have installed it. In case you want to keep your system very minimal. That reminds me, if you remove a package you no longer want, remove it with pacman -Rs the s flag will remove all dependencies as well, provided no other packages on your system need those dependencies.

Other than that, knock yourself out. I really enjoy the bare-bones approach you get with Arch.

 

[allenskd]

I am, I just discovered I've been doing some things wrong with systemd. Thanks to their User service session it all makes sense. My god, I really really need to read systemd documentation.

I did read the beginners guide before installing. You never know if you are leaving out tiny details that might make you expend countless hours on an issue.

I think I'm done installing packages for today. Steam and all the games installed work. Even the binaries of WINE I compiled ages ago work with no 32bit problems.

Hopefully I won't run into serious problems in the future...

 

[allenskd]

Just a note, although I don't want to periodically update this thread on my findings I must say that yaourt is a splendid tool. I can check for the PKGBUILD as well although I'm most of the time trusting.

I must add, maybe to redeem myself for being a tad ignorant on it--is that the stability is darn nice. Consistency of most of the applications I've installed hasn't given me a problem.

Lastly I totally forgot about Infinality, most of the time I usually install it on my Debian box. I think this is the first time I've totally satisfied with the new fonts additions + infinality patches (which I wonder why they aren't on mainstream).

It's beautiful :')

I need to find more neat fonts...

 

[Aryvandaar]

If you don't find a package in the Manjaro repositories or the AUR repositories, then that package does not exist.