Today we're starting off with a little double-dose of distribution news, helping you to keep up with the wider community around Linux and gaming.
Firstly, Arch Linux now has a new project leader. After heading the project for over 10 years, Aaron Griffin has stepped down. In the brief post they said "Arch Linux needs involved leadership to make hard decisions and direct the project where it needs to go. And I am not in a position to do this.".
To get a new leader, in a team effort, the Arch Linux staff came up with a new process to elect a new leader around every two years. The first official vote has already been done, with "Levente Polyak (anthraxx)" taking over as Arch Linux leader. Hopefully they will keep it going strong.
As for Manjaro Linux, itself based upon Arch Linux and a distribution I use as my daily driver, there's a huge new release out with Manjaro "Kyria" 19.0. You can pick it up with either the Xfce, GNOME or KDE desktop environments with Xfce being their "flagship" offering that has the most attention to it.
It's shipping with Xfce 4.14, KDE Plasma 5.17, GNOME 3.34, Kernel 5.4 LTS and Pamac 9.3 as the package manager. You can see the release announcement here.
Since forming an official company, Manjaro just seems to be going from strength to strength.
About 3-4 years ago i changed to Manjaro (XFCE again, i like simple and light), because i had some issues with Ubuntu, not sure what but i felt i wanted to change.
Since then, my gaming experience, and my overall experience actually, has improved.
Not sure if it’s really Manjaro, or simply a few years of evolution, but that’s it, and i don’t feel i want to change anytime soon.
QuoteWhat is that Manjaro brings to the table?
The fact that it's a point and click installation instead of CLI, plus the fact it handles GPU driver installation for you.
Not everyone wants to do things manually, even though we think it's easy ;)
Quoting: GuestWhat is that Manjaro brings to the table?
Somebody else has at least briefly tested the updates before you get them. Reduces the chance of breakage.
(BTW, I tried just using BPM within manjaro gnome and I always had window focus problems, so it just doesn't switch smoothly enough to work without a mouse handy.)
Quoting: GuestAs an Arch user for more than 12 years, i don't understand why people need to use Manjaro these days. Installing Arch is very, very easy these days, and you get to use the real thing and cut off the intermediary. What is that Manjaro brings to the table?There are also things that you probably set up many years ago that you may have forgotten about, like build hooks when you update Nvidia drivers or VirtualBox. There are things like that that are small enough that a lot of people just expect them to work because they never had to think about them before. Arch gives you the choice of doing it manually or using your choice of tools to accomplish the task instead of going with the flow and using the distro's choice of tooling. But you know, a lot of people don't want to deal with the hassle of those niggling choices.
I'm using the same installation from years ago and have even migrated it along multiple computer upgrades. I've taken care of all the little choices and it's all convenient enough for me now. But when I want to manage my kids' and wife's computers, or if I'm recommending a distro to someone that's not a computer hobbyist, it's not Arch. Manjaro is what I "throw on there." I don't have to do anything after installation! :)
Hopefully this didn't sound like shouting at your face. I think you had a fair question.
Today I'm verifying backups and then I'll give it a try. But please stop me once I start saying "Btw: I use Arch".
Quoting: JanneSomebody else has at least briefly tested the updates before you get them. Reduces the chance of breakage.Arch has a testing repo and its packages are tested. It's not unusual to wait several weeks between major kernel versions, for example. And Mesa 20 has not yet hit the main repos because it's still in testing.
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