After being fed up with certain things and generally being unable to game anyway due to having a measly 3Mbps bandwidth divided among the 5 people in my household I have decided that is no better time to use Linux as my daily driver. Eventually I'm going to do a custom Arch install but I am not comfortable with Linux enough yet.
Just wanted to know your tips as of specific installation parameters and everyday software and such (music players, browsers, etc). Also is it possible to install KDE 5 (I must do this, other DEs are just so ugly to me) from the Arch repos straight onto Manjaro? Or can I update from the default KDE version? Eventually I'd like to just use a WM but I have a feeling that requires a good amount of CLI/terminal familiarity to get away with.
If it is of any use in regards to driver support I'm running a 4670k and a traditional hard drive, so no SSD. 1080p display, also have an onboard LAN and wireless NIC.
KDE 5 is not something I would recommend yet to be honest, it still lacks many features, and there is no elegant way of having KDE 4.14 and KDE 5 simultaneously installed. You could try it out in a virtual container though, I recommend either OpenSuSE Factory or the Neon Project (Ubuntu Core based) to try out KDE 5.
Manjaro is pretty complete out of the box. Maybe explore the stuff some and if you have questions, post them.
Two things are important after install, one is SSD related, so that's something you don't need, and the other thing is to switch to the latest kernel, which is very easy with "mhwd-kernel -i linux316", but Manjaro now also has a GUI front end for mhwd, including for kernel configuration and for graphics driver selection.
Something I like to do, is to install a drop down terminal (yakuake on KDE, guake on gnome, xfce terminal has that functionality already, it just needs to be bound to a hot key), and to install firewalld with the firewalld-applet. I also install Tomoyo on Manjaro, and kvm-qemu, and all the language packs I need for everything. Then darktable on gtk-based stuff or digikam on qt based stuff to have basic photo management and editing functionality, audacious on gnome shell systems to have a good music player, eclipse and netbeans as primary IDE's, hplib for the printers (is preinstalled on Manjaro I believe), some various tools for networking and diagnostics, and I customize the GUI. But all of that is personal preference.
So after using Manjaro on KDE4 for a 24 hours I can confirm that it is, at least to me, a mess. I don't like the GUI, things crash, and it has a lot of apps that I'm assuming are from KDE that I don't care about. So now I'm installing #!, I have used it in a VM before and I like it.
Which file system should I use? Does ext4 give me all the advantages of using linux as far as filesystems go? Also should I use MBR or the G-thing (can't remember the name) as my boot sector?
If you do not like KDE4, Try XFCE4 Manjaro, it is similar to a Windows UI, it also looks very nice, dark and sleek, I prefer XFCE4 over KDE, but I would not call KDE a mess, it works better than the Windows UI.
Elaborate on what you mean by "Things crash" it would seem nothing in X, so it should be easy to fix, is it a specific application? a driver? we maybe able to help, also KDE is rather stable, so unless its a K app, I doubt it very much, and QT (Which it is based upon) is rather stable also, never had a KDE app crash on me.
As for filesystems use EXT4 with GPT (Guided Partition Table) this is the default with most distros now, although it will soon be GPT/BTRFS, GPT is default in Linux and works well, only use MBR if you run Windows also.
If you do not like KDE4, Try XFCE4 Manjaro, it is similar to a Windows UI, it also looks very nice, dark and sleek, I prefer XFCE4 over KDE, but I would not call KDE a mess, it works better than the Windows UI.
Isn't that backwards? KDE4 looks like windows. XFCE looks like Mac. Unless you were describing the KDE interface.