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Generative AI seems like it's everywhere now right? So here's a letter from the owner (me, hi!) formally setting out the GamingOnLinux stance on it.
[...]
Thanks for reading.

🤨

AI-generated 0%
Human-written & AI-refined 0%
Human-written 100%
😊

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Manjaro was once a brilliant distro and the Linux ecosystem wouldn't be where it is without it, but the past few years have been disastrous for the distro. I'd love for the distro to solve its issue and be anew what it was in 2015.

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Of course a person is going to be better than AI. The whole point of having voice actors is they know how to actually act, to bring some kind of clear intention and emotion into their roles with all their own little personal voice quirks. You don't get that with generating fake AI voices.

Well said.

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Quoting: pb

Quoting: Cyril

Quoting: pbMy son is on manjaro and his system breaks on every update. But apparently arch is "too complicated". 😆

You're exaggerating, don't you? ^^

Maybe a bit. 😇 But he's updating 1-2 times a year and there are always some conflicts and I need to help him fix it. ;-) Last time I rebuilt the mirror list so hopefully the next update will go more smoothly.

That's probably part of the problem for him. Manjaro needs to be updated more frequently than once or twice a year. Also, turning off the AUR prior to updates also helps to prevent breakage, I'd found.

I used Manjaro for about two years before I left for Pop!_OS (and later, Linux Mint). Support for legacy Nvidia GPUs was very poor and management had a very crappy attitude towards its community/users. For me, the proposed opt-out telemetry was the final straw.

I think the big part of the problem for me was not realizing that a rolling or semi-rolling distro is not really all that ideal for legacy hardware. Old hardware needs a more stable, less cutting-edge, environment, in my opinion.

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I regretted that the Manjaro team chose to drag its feet on Manjaro Summit.
https://forum.manjaro.org/t/manjaro-summit-public-alpha-now-available/176995

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Highly doubt they would've replaced these without the drama.

We don't necessarily believe in replacing humans with AI all the time.

My heroes.

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Personally I have ran manjaro without any real issues on my gaming computer for roughly 8 years, my work computer for 6 years and I have a laptop that runs manjaro and I frequently test computers with it. To date it has grenaded itself twice for no fault of mine. I _HAVE_ absolutely messed it up a few times going "I am fairly sure this'll explode if I try this but... I'll try this" and lo and behold, it ded. But I think I've had to reinstall once.

Sure there are issues of forgetting to set things up before switching GPU from AMD to Nvidia and all that but all of those are not the distros fault, but mine :P

So personally I hope Manjaro stays a chugging, I know I probably could install something else with ease, but also... I kinda just wanna keep running the thing that has ran for yonks

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Quoting: Arten

Quoting: CaldathrasThe misnomer "AI" is just a marketing label used to inaccurately promote LLM. In my opinion, when the backlash began against LLMs and their objectionable social, legal, economical and environmental impacts, it was convenient for the spin doctors to confuse the issue by throwing translation, grammar checking, spell checking and other older technologies that pre-date LLMs under the same label. How could we object to these uses of "AI"? We don't. We object to LLMs and how they are being promoted and presently utilized. Personally, I also object to the label "AI" because LLMs are any but intelligent.

My two cents.

Thanks, Liam, for your determined stance.

Spell checking alone isn’t enough. As a Czech speaker, I find that having an LLM correct Czech works much better. Czech is a stupidly complicated language with many illogical exceptions, so we at least need the ability to guess the context for a correct correction. Spell‑checkers were terrible before LLMs.
The same goes for English when you can’t formulate a sentence correctly. My English is terrible, so using an LLM to correct it is very useful. Can a spell checker do that for me?

No, but a "grammar checker" can.

I know I'm just getting technical on you but a "spell checker" is not the tool you are using. What you are using is a "translator". This would be a much more complex tool that utilizes "grammar checking" for both Czech and English. Spelling would be a minor component by comparison. I doubt there would be much need for an LLM in a spell checker.

Word processors, in my experience, had also been doing a pretty good job with grammar checking (with English) before the advent of LLMs. I can't speak to translation, as I've rarely had the need in the past. I haven't really looked into it, so I don't know how much of an impact LLMs have had on grammar checkers and translators.

Whatever tool you are using as a translator is doing a brilliant job.

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"We don't necessarily believe in replacing humans with AI all the time."

That "necessarily" negates the meaning of the sentence; it turns the statement into "we do believe in replacing humans with AI all the time, but there are some circumstances where we might not."

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Frictional Games ? You can buy their games your eyes closed 🥰
The only "sad" thing is that their last game, "Amnesia: The Bunker", is not GNU/Linux native, for i dont know what reason... 🤬

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Quoting: fenglengshunOh, this is finally blowing up now? I actually skipped the entire section where the Mathieu glazed AI in The Linux Destination podcast. It was pretty long.

Look, I get it, people use AI. I personally don't mind if he generates codes, checks it, rewrite it into something that fits with the rest of the code in the project. Others' lines might differ, but as long as the program didn't become slop, I am willing to tolerate it.

But this:

Anyway, I was suspecting that this "issue" might come up so I've removed the Claude co-authorship from the commits a few days ago. So good luck figuring out what's generated and what is not.

Is absolutely the wrong way to handle it.

Although I do find it rather ironic that Lutris, in the same podcast, is claimed to be a platform for game preservation, and yet he uses AI, which Myrient (a game preservation site) has cited to be a reason why they're shutting down.

I think you have a healthy outlook on the tech. Though I would say that there is nothing wrong removing the co-authorship tag. In fact, developers should just disable that co-authorship tag from commits to begin with, so that removing it later won't be any added prolonging of the drama as we all inevitably move on from the hysteria. It's really of no more interest for the commit than knowing any other tool that was used.

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In the past, I was quite interested in the Manjaro promise. I tried it 3 times, on 2 different devices. Eventually, something always broke, and the system would become unusable. Then, I started seeing various criticisms about security concerns, and I thought that something isn't quite right with the distro.

Nowadays, I'm very happy with Fedora.

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Thank you Patrick for prioritizing humans over AI.
Lets hope it will stay that way !

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no joke I actually really like that idea. Like how nintendo used to do the seal of quality on their "good" titles for the old consoles. (sadly they don't do that anymore and the switch shop is pure unfiltered garbage sigh)

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Quoting: scaineI still miss Pamac though. I haven't looked to see if it's portable to a generic Arch install.

it's available via the AUR. pamac-all is probably the one you want

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As the old saying goes...

A drop of wine in sewage is sewage... a drop of sewage in wine is also sewage.

So yeah.. great... unity is noticing linux... that's about as cool as facebook noticing linux.

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Maybe they can do a spinoff light weight version and call it mounjaro

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Another one here where I switched to Manjaro about 6 years ago for more frequent updates but stable ones. I've only had one major bad update, but their forums were helpful with getting the system back up without reinstalling from scratch (note: I did not read the release notes before diving in; never again).

At this point my laptop is old and I barely use it for gaming, so I'm not keen on it having closer to cutting edge kernels and drivers. Most of my regular software is through Flatpak so I'm really only dependent on Manjaro for security and desktop environment updates anyway. If I need to switch to a new distro, I won't be very picky as long as updates keep downtime very low since my wife generally uses the laptop now because she likes the big screen.

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Quoting: g000hwaiting for it to be reduced in price, maybe 50%+ ideally 75%+ discount

Should have bought DRG:S before the price increase in January 2025 ;)
FWIW DRG x DRG: Survivor bundle on Steam is currently ~64% off, two excellent games well worth it. 15€ instead of the regular 43 with both on sale and a bundle discount on top.

These games are worth full price anyway, both quite reasonably priced.

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Sadly this has been coming for a long while. Users have been declining, the contributors have been leaving, management has been a disaster. as @scaine said, with cachy doing what it does nowadays, I would just recommend that over Manjaro to any other user looking for arch flavorings.

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Manjaro's only real selling point is that it's Arch with an installer, and I ran it for a while just for that. But I feel like much better alternatives exist for that today, including Arch itself having better installers.

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File under "No Shit Sherlock".

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Quoting: minidouridiculous, but not surprising
there's no stopping the moral panic against AI it seems

I must say that your pseudo doesn't really fit you, if I think of what dou/doux means in French (soft, sweet...). 😀

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Quoting: Cyril

Quoting: pbMy son is on manjaro and his system breaks on every update. But apparently arch is "too complicated". 😆

You're exaggerating, don't you? ^^

Maybe a bit. 😇 But he's updating 1-2 times a year and there are always some conflicts and I need to help him fix it. ;-) Last time I rebuilt the mirror list so hopefully the next update will go more smoothly.

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Quoting: pbMy son is on manjaro and his system breaks on every update. But apparently arch is "too complicated". 😆

You're exaggerating, don't you? ^^
Like many others, It works pretty well for me and I'm using it for 10+ years, so pretty stable in my eyes. Usually when it breaks it's my fault, not really Manjaro's. I'm on XFCE, it seems to be the most stable of all, the KDE folks did have some issues more than once though.
I hope positivity comes out of this, I'm happy with Manjaro and don't plan to change right now.

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Quoting: TriciaPearson

Quoting: dragonherder He did not initially hide it though. He hid it after basically being bullied gor using AI to finish work he hasn't had the motivation to do on his own codebase... he then got bullied for removing the attribution because now he was trying to hide it. As another pointed out and I responded to it is basically coming down to people bullying developers using AI no matter what

That's also partially untrue. At the very first he didn't hide it, BUT he did hid it BEFORE being bothered. See his own statement :

" No, I removed the Claude attribution way before anyone complained. Looking at the git history, it seems to have happened on Feb 18th. The only thing I did as a result of this thread was putting them back. As a bonus, it fucks over every news source saying I've hidden Claude usage, making their articles wrong and outdated. "

Likely something aimed at us for reporting on it. But it goes to show how confusing he's made the situation by hiding it, and his later comments about hiding it. The whole situation is a stupid mess of his own creation.

Personally, I've removed Lutris and won't be using it myself or suggesting it in future.

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I love the idea of Manjaro - Arch, but with milestones (stable releases). It sounds like the power of Arch, but without the constant fear that every update will bring issues. And pamac - lovely. They've actually addressed one of the biggest issues (for me) of Arch.

But now that I'm on CachyOS with its built-in Snapper/BTRFS integration, I have that comfort anyway. If I do an update and my system has issues, I just reboot and choose the snapshot before the upgrade via Grub. Easy.

I still miss Pamac though. I haven't looked to see if it's portable to a generic Arch install.

I hope Manjaro get their organisational ducks in a row. It would be great to see what they could achieve without constantly having to fight internally with each other.

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My experience with Manjaro had been pleasant back then - there were some issues with libcrypto migration and some updates had had some issues, but never something more than a quick snapshot rollback + reupdate wouldn't fix (well, aside for an issue after 8 month of not upgrading as my PC was left at home but that's just a known Arch issue).

What made me stop was the way they removed, restored, and then removed some codecs without adequate dialogue and then not mentioning it in the updates announcement. Between that, and the various management mishaps, I just chose to move to Universal Blue, then Bazzite, and now CachyOS.

I think their community is right in wanting to break away, though I would say making a new distro without the associated branding of Manjaro that is just toxic now.

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I've had the same install of Manjaro on my main PC for over 10 years (throughout a system rebuild with new motherboard). I've had a couple of breakages, but nothing insurmountable, overall its been pretty stable... (TBH, I did try to move off Manjaro a few years ago, but had some weird issue with the calamares installer which all the distros I wanted to use employed, so I just ended up staying on Manjaro)

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Would suck to lose Manjaro. It's basically Arch, but with the Stable branch you can update every time when there is an update. You don't have the same sort of commodity with Arch where with updates stuff can easily break so you have to postpone updates and look info from packages a lot.

Same goes with CachyOS. There can be breakage happening on those much more easy.
Something that is Arch and postpones updates and have testing for those is much wanted IMO.

Ive been basically years with Manjaro and it has been rock solid for me. Would be sad to see it go.

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