I'm using manjaro for most of my work now. I moved from Ubuntu half a year ago, and I also have a Mac. I'm not going back to Ubuntu any time soon. The work the Arch team does with package management is simply amazing. I can mostly use official, up-to-date packages, sometimes stuff from AUR. I prefer my Linux to Mac for backend work. The Mac has a nice screen, nice speakers, and I sometimes need to use Figma or Excel, apps that don't support Linux natively. Stuff preventing me from using the Mac more: 1. Using terminals and Emacs just isn't as nice as with Manjaro and i3 / sway 2. I like being able to choose how I do things. My Mac requires a bit more maintenance than sudo pacman -Syuu once in a while 3. The more I use Linux / Manjaro (Arch), the more I can rely on it. They don't just change arbitrary stuff. If it works now, it'll likely continue to work.

What desktop manager / window manager are you planning to use on Manjaro? What have you been using on Ubuntu?

I don't have any plans. Im using the default on ubuntu, isn't that gnome or unity? I'm fairly sure it's gnome. Mostly i feel like I'm having to do too much work updating packages. Like emacs got weird. I ended up on the snap version.

I think I moved to Manjaro 2y or more ago. I had it on my last laptop and it takes time to understand how to install the drivers and set it up (if it doesn't work out of the box and probably you would want to customize it anyway). But once you do it it works. But occasionally it breaks the window manager between versions (very rarely) because something changes and then I have to reboot (Yes, I reboot only after upgrade when I have time). I use i3wm and I use mate-power-manager to handle the power events (but for some reason it doesn't work well for this laptop; don't have time to find out). I think that if you're used to default window manager then go with something similar. I always have a backup window manager just in case I mess up my i3 (That probably only can happen during the set up of i3 and then probably won't happen at all). Also you may want to learn to boot into single-user mode if your laptop fails when upgrading lightdm or a similar display service. Because if that fails you'll be locked out. Upgrades something make the packages weird without coming back. For instance I used pgadmin and then Manjaro decided to upgrade the version of Django or something and then pgadmin (which uses a previous stable version) stopped working at all. So this is the risk that I carry while using Manjaro (it's rolling update and bleeding edge... so... pgadmin didn't upgrade their deps and were left out). Fortunately I have docker and I can run pgadmin via docker. But if it would be a regular user they would have to give up pgadmin. Also it's nice that I can simply upgrade a kernel and don't care about much (but then I also need to upgrade the driver or something). It's not always an upgrade without problems. Sometimes something can break your X11 session so you have to know the Ctrl+Alt+Number keys to enter the terminal mode and find out what it is. And I'm fine with it. At least I don't need to reinstall just because Ubuntu decided to bump their version and I want a clean install. I think that mhwd is great for most laptops as it installs the drivers for you. So depending on the laptop you may be fine. If you're not frustrated using Ubuntu on that laptop then you should probably be fine.

You may also find https://pop.system76.com/ interesting. It is also Ubuntu based but has a very nice desktop environment with a strong philosophy. It gets you started without too much hassle and focuses a lot on aesthetics and workflow management.

I use manjaro xfce for my vms and KDE for my physical machines. Both work nice, but KDE is much more polished and straight up pretty. No complaints about either. I don't distro hop much so I can't compare it to any recent version of Ubuntu, mint, or pop.

Any nixOS users?

Can you use nixOS for your day-to-day machine? :thinking_face: I don't know much about it but it seems as if it's some kind of alternative to Docker :thinking_face:

I think yes. Cc @U054AT6KT @UKFSJSM38

How to nixOS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ck4J2Faa7Fc

+1 for sway (or i3/awesomewm/etc) compared to fully-fledged DEs like KDE or Gnome. Switching to a tiling window manager was one of the best decisions I've made in the last decade or so 😛. Even xfce feels bloated in comparison (and definitely less ergonomic). I'm currently on Fedora and it's great that it's bleeding edge-ish but I don't like how systemd is shoved down my throat, so I wouldn't recommend it. Guix and nixOS are the future but I don't think I'm ready to switch yet. 😄 Guix is too opinionated (parts of my current hardware are proprietary unfortunately) and nix's DSL is a bit awkward. I've used Manjaro in the past, it's fine.

> I don't have any plans. Im using the default on ubuntu, isn't that gnome or unity? I'm fairly sure it's gnome. > > Mostly i feel like I'm having to do too much work updating packages. Like emacs got weird. I ended up on the snap version. > If less hassle is what you want, I honestly think you'd be quite happy with a Mac and homebrew. But you do get more recent packages on Manjaro / arch. Between Ubuntu and something arch-based I'm really happy I decided to go the arch route. Perhaps dual boot Manjaro next to your Ubuntu to try it out? If it gives you more hassle, just stay on Ubuntu. But if you get over the initial learning hurdle, you'll have a Linux distribution you're more happy with. Then you can decide between Manjaro and OSX at a later point if you feel like it :)

> Any nixOS users? NixOS is an amazing desktop OS once you learn the language. Or rather, once you learn the nixpkgs idioms. For most features you just have to add a single line like hardware.bluetooth.enable = true to your config and it will install the necessary packages and configuration for you

A guy from the video says that it's a source-based distro. So that means that it installs packages from sources. How often do you need to compile your own? It says sometimes they have the packages cached and you could download the binaries. But when it's not cached you'll have to build it. Also how does recency of packages compare with... arch or something similar?

if a package has already been compiled with the same parameters (as a pure function let's say) then you get it from the hydra cache, which is fairly common I think?

It's not that common, but if using flakes it is, which is a nix tool to help with lock upstream deps

https://search.nixos.org/packages Here you can find all available nix pkgs which is a lot

We have #nix if you want to discuss more about it too

Every official package is fetched from the cache by default, unless you override its inputs with something like a newer version of GCC. With recency of packages, it's very easy to contribute to upstream 🙂 I've never had any problems with outdated packages. But yes #nix is a better place to discuss