Manjaro Linux 20.1 'Mikah' is out now with a theme refresh

Can't wait to get home to update :D

I love the design choices of Manjaro's team, it's always clean and with nice colors. I hope that Xubuntu changes their theme, that greybird feels too antiquated.

What's the name of this theme?

I love the design choices of Manjaro's team, it's always clean and with nice colors. I hope that Xubuntu changes their theme, that greybird feels too antiquated.

What's the name of this theme?

I guess you missed it, but the article says it's called 'Matcha'.

I love the design choices of Manjaro's team, it's always clean and with nice colors. I hope that Xubuntu changes their theme, that greybird feels too antiquated.

What's the name of this theme?

Always funny to see how different personal taste can be. To me this looks about as off putting as it can get.

Since i’ve switched from Ubunta/Mint to Manjaro about 3 or 4 years ago, my Linux experience is better.
Less issues, more games running, but it may simply be because all main distro are getting better with time.
Anyway, i like Manjaro and i don’t see myself changing anytime soon.

Pamac was one of the things I really liked about Manjaro when I used it. It worked well and let me experience a slice of Arch. T'm not a fan of their theming or color schemes, but it was a reasonably polished and integrated distro.

I love the design choices of Manjaro's team, it's always clean and with nice colors. I hope that Xubuntu changes their theme, that greybird feels too antiquated.

What's the name of this theme?

Always funny to see how different personal taste can be. To me this looks about as off putting as it can get.

I'm not a fan either, but then I don't like the default look of most distros. I have a fairly idiosyncratic notion of what looks good (eg I like real colours better than interior-decorator muddy pseudocolours); one thing I like about Linux is how easy it is to decisively change these things to something aligning more with my taste.


Last edited by Purple Library Guy on 14 September 2020 at 8:35 pm UTC

Since i moved from ubuntu to manjaro i've never look back. Manjaro (specially the testing branch) have fast updates with good stability. Their theming kind grown on me over the time, but i still think they have some homework to do in this department.

I love the design choices of Manjaro's team, it's always clean and with nice colors. I hope that Xubuntu changes their theme, that greybird feels too antiquated.

What's the name of this theme?

I guess you missed it, but the article says it's called 'Matcha'.

Oh, my bad. I've read a lot of Mikah that I missed Matcha... lol

I love the design choices of Manjaro's team, it's always clean and with nice colors. I hope that Xubuntu changes their theme, that greybird feels too antiquated.

What's the name of this theme?

Always funny to see how different personal taste can be. To me this looks about as off putting as it can get.

Yeah, feels like I have an unpopular opinion about the themes that Manjaro uses. But I really like the colors, a good green, good grey, the dark panel, etc...

Your correction report on Manjaro Linux 20.1 'Mikah' is out now with a theme refresh was:

Manjaro Linux, the semi-rolling distribution...

1. True-rolling distributions: These distributions update every part of your operating system.

2. Semi-rolling distributions: These distributions don’t update every part of your operating system. They are divided into a rolling part and a non-rolling part. These distributions often have a non-rolling core. They don’t update the kernel and drivers but do update everything else and have rolling software repositories.

Source: https://www.maketecheasier.com/linux-rolling-release-model/


Manjaro definitely fits the former over the latter.

I suggest you make this as a comment, lectrode, since I don't agree with it, and given that Liam lost his Manjaro install because they updated the Nvidia driver without releasing the matching kernel driver, I doubt he'll agree with it either!

It's a great observation though, and one I'm invested in - I'm thinking of trying either Manjaro or Endevour and the whole "semi-rolling" piece is putting me off Manjaro, so it would be a good/useful debate.

Thanks,
Scaine.

Per the above, continuing discussion here.

The manjaro devs still seem to be ironing out their metapackage kernel support. That was something that a recently departed member of the manjaro team would manage. The team was somewhat pushed to update the nvidia driver to 450 in a rushed manner (since a 440 update apparently broke some functionality) and neglected to update 5.7 nvidia modules right away (which is what linux-latest points to). 5.8 may also not have been updated as there were module build errors until recently.

(This is also one of the reasons I have people use the linux-lts metapackage instead of linux-latest - the actual latest kernel available occasionally has bugs or incomplete module support)

For that particular situation, it's more of an unfortunate oversight than the deliberate withholding of updates.

The metapackages were specifically created to automatically move a user to the latest recommended, or the latest lts. If you have a kernel installed that is EOL and is removed from the repos, one of these metapackages will be automatically installed to replace that kernel, install the respective updated kernel, and ensure the system is able to continue to install updates (without the metapackage, continuing to have the eol kernel leads to the inability to update). I'd argue that because this forces the kernel to be updated (if an eol one is installed), that this qualifies as a rolling release model, not semi-rolling.


Last edited by lectrode on 14 September 2020 at 9:55 pm UTC

I quite like the idea of Manjaro, but I'm also leaning towards trying Endeavour because it offers a Cinnamon download as an installer option. I think I might just have to install them both and see which one "fits" the best. I use a lot of work-related proprietary tools for my day job, so they'll all have to be well supported - things like Teams (boke!), Horizon, Zoom and Dropbox. And of course the usual suspects like Discord, Spotify, Steam and Mame will all be well supported regardless.

Teams (boke!), Horizon, Zoom and Dropbox

In the same boat. My day job requires all of those. Of course all of those are available in the AUR. I'm one of the admins who manages horizon applications at my place of work, which makes it really easy to rely solely on my manjaro linux laptop for said work. Any windows-based tool I might need (like RSAT) I can just present to my linux laptop.

But I digress...

Manjaro has a cinnamon offering as well, it's just not one of the "flagship" DEs.

All the community-provided ISOs can be found here.


I honestly haven't tried endevouros, but that's probably mainly because I manage around ~20 systems that all have manjaro. I haven't really run into any issues with manjaro that have prompted me to look elsewhere. If it's like arch in that there's only 1 officially supported kernel, that's a bit of a no-go for me. I have different hardware that requires different kernels, and the ability to easily switch between supported kernels is a god-send.


Last edited by lectrode on 15 September 2020 at 5:53 am UTC

I have different hardware that requires different kernels

I'm curious of the details on this, if you don't mind sharing?

Well, I downloaded the Cinnamon remix of Manjaro via torrent today, checked its SHA1 checksum, burnt it onto a live USB and booted up. However, for some reason, the liveUSB doesn't see my USB ethernet connection. Even weirder, I can browse the internet via Firefox, but I can't ping 8.8.8.8.

Honestly never seen anything like it. When I unplug the USB, the whole networking stack crashes.

If I reboot without the USB Ethernet plugged in, the wireless kicks in fine and the installer appears to work.

It's not filling me with confidence, I have to say. Still, it's my secondary PC, a Dell laptop, so I'm willing to sacrifice it to the distro gods to see what blessings might be bestowed. I'll finish the install tomorrow and report back on first impressions.

Edit1: The installer isn't hiDPI aware, so it looks awful. Resizing it helps a little.
Edit2: The full-disk encryption option doesn't have a GUI, so it dumps me at an hiDPI full screen console screen and (if you have a magnifying glass), you see that it's asking for the key. Pretty terrible experience. Even more bizarre - when you enter the password, it prints (still tiny) "opened slot0", then weirdly appears to reboot - I see the primary Dell logo again, only this time, it boots to my lightdm login! So freaky.
Edit3: No sign of Dropbox in the Add/Remove programs. So I reckon, it's in the AUR. I enable the AUR, refresh the database, sure enough, now I have an AUR tab. I click on that, click on Dropbox, click on "Build" (weird, but it's the only option I can see), after a minute, I have "Failed to build Dropbox". This isn't going too well!
Edit4: It just keeps failing, an error about "one or more PGP signatures couldn't be verified". Oof. Well, I'm not giving up quite yet, but I'll google it in the morning. I've had enough for one hour of distro-hopping! I have to say though, it's going better than last time I tried Manjaro on my main PC - that just kept rebooting lightdm without letting me login (after three separate attempts to build from two separate USB keys - very consistent!). That was about 2 years ago though, and it was an Nvidia box back then.


Last edited by scaine on 15 September 2020 at 9:10 pm UTC

Snip

Sorry, it's a bit funny to see you having a lot of issues. Like some other said, when using/testing a new distro, it depends on how you using it too, your hardware etc.

I don't use Google's DNS nor an USB ethernet.
-> So, no issue for me.

My monitor is a 1080p one.
-> So, no issue for me with the installer nor the full encryption disk CLI.

About Dropbox, I don't use it, but in the AUR you can unfortunately have that sort of issue, it's not often a big one though, but since it's maintained by the users and not officially it can happen. But in my experience, a lot of AUR packages works OOTB, sometimes a little fix is needed but that's all.

About the issue you have after the decryption disk, it's seems weird though.
On my side, I also have the "opened slot0" too, but my computer doesn't restart, it just loads the system normally.

Good luck for your testing though!

<network related issues>

You installed the 20.1 version, right? (older versions are pretty much just there for historical context, they don't make much sense for an install in most cases) Make sure your system is fully up-to-date. Once you do that, you can try different kernels as well to see if the issue might be kernel-specific. I'd try 5.4 and 5.7 specifically.

Even more bizarre - when you enter the password, it prints (still tiny) "opened slot0", then weirdly appears to reboot - I see the primary Dell logo again, only this time, it boots to my lightdm login! So freaky.

Can't speak to the full-disk encryption personally, but others have also inquired into the GUI for it. Plymouth is in the repos, and detailed instructions for installing it are here (granted, these instructions are for Arch Linux, but it'd be pretty similar on Manjaro). It was dropped in 2017 for various reasons. Haven't really missed it.

As far as booting goes, the default UEFI install will use the logo provided in your motherboard firmware for the boot splash. It's a feature. At least, I believe this is the case. I always use legacy over UEFI.

Edit4: It just keeps failing, an error about "one or more PGP signatures couldn't be verified".

Dropbox AUR page has instructions for importing pgp key. This is an additional security feature some AUR packages have. If it continues to be unable to verify, it may be that the dropbox binary was updated on dropbox's website and the hash hasn't been updated yet. You can skip the verification with:
sudo pacman -S yay
yay -S --noconfirm dropbox


Last edited by lectrode on 16 September 2020 at 12:23 am UTC

I have different hardware that requires different kernels

I'm curious of the details on this, if you don't mind sharing?

Most of the systems I manage are on the latest lts kernel (currently 5.4). These are mostly thinkpad laptops and some dell towers. These range from 7 to 3 years old. Mix of personal and work use. With any new kernel, I didn't migrate them right away; I kept them on the previous LTS until I deem the new LTS "stable" after a period of use on my personal systems.

At the moment, there are only 4 systems I put on different kernels. 2 of those have newer AMD hardware and have better support with 5.7 and 5.8 (one is a threadripper, the other I can't remember off hand, but it's in a lenovo ideapad that is only a few months old).

One is a system76 laptop from about a year and a half ago. I don't think it needs a newer kernel, but that's the preference of it's current user.

The last one is a bit of an oddball. ~5 year old gigabyte mobo with intel cpu and a gtx970. For some reason games freeze on it with 5.4, but work fine with 5.7. The mobo has been questionable since it was first acquired, so this might just be something with that.

I have different hardware that requires different kernels

At the moment, there are only 4 systems I put on different kernels...

OK, so you have "reasons" but not ones that really match your original statement. I was just wondering what hardware didn't work with newer kernels and was making you stick with older ones, or what "kernel spins" were required for oddball devices. But it's really just "I want to test the latest before I roll it out".