The Odyssey of Zippy: the 5th level (Linux) Wizard

This is practically a log of my adventures in technology (mostly Linux) to help those who are using it, and more specifically those who use the distro I do as I continue using it:

Let's start with a review of the distro I started using the very day I made this thread, shall we?

Manjaro: from simplicity (and freedom) came elegance -Review (Pre 1 Cinnamon Edition 0.9.0)

So for about my entire time of using Linux (~3 years) I've been distro hopping primarily between Linux Mint, Fedora, openSUSE, AntergOS, and in my earlier day Debian Testing and SolydXK. Every distro had something I liked rather it be the software included (or not included), the community, or the package manager whilst every one of them had something I despised, some less than others, but still.

It eventually came down to two distros: openSUSE and LMDE. LMDE was near perfect. Cinnamon looked amazing, codecs were just there, and I was familiar with it as my first distro was in fact Linux Mint. Point being it just worked. But I was spoiled by the new technologies on Fedora and on Tumbleweed. Did you say no BTRFS (it's possible, but a pain in the ass to get working)? The kernel is over four verions old?! I'm sorry, but that doesn't do. I understand I can compile it from scratch, but I want it to just be there.

openSUSE is like the Linux equivalent of VW. Seriously, it is as smooth as German engineering FOR MOST PEOPLE. Emphasis on that. USE WHAT WORKS BEST FOR YOU; EVERYONE IS DIFFERENT, AND NOTHING IS ONE SIZE FITS ALL. Turns out, I don't really care for Gnome, KDE, XFCE (I kind of like it), MATE, or LXDE. I want Cinnamon, I want customizable simplicity. So I took the chance and tried getting Cinnamon to run. Iwa so close, but yet so far. I traced logs and everything, but it kept falling back. I was done with this.

Before I continue I would just like to give some background. I'm visually impaired, so the DE must support magnification without hiccups. Gnome nearly was that ticket, adn to this day I can use it and do like it, but the magnifier is terrible. It jerks around, and cuts off menus and icons. I filed a bug report and tried reviving it, and to thi day no reply. This bug has persisted throughout Gnome 3s entire life span, but yet has been overlooked. Wow. I filed a bug for Plasma 5 because the UI would hog the display even when the desktop was magnified. Guess what? About five devs responded, and after awhile began to work at fixing it. That's what I call epic. Literally five econds later I had an entire team of helpful developers. I think Plasma 5 would easily be my favorite had it been as keyboard driven as Cinnamon and allowed use of meta for the menu. I really enjoyed my somewhat short time with it. XFCE and LXDE are light, but XFCE has a terrible magnifier, and uses old technology. Unfortunitely LXDE doesn't even have a magnifier so it was out of the question.

So here I am wanting the best of both worlds so I kump on Manjaro Cinnamon Edition Pre 1 0.9.0. Gues what? It looks great out the box, has codecs, has yaourt, has Linux-CK support via enabling a repo, Spotify was in the AUR, BTRFS was supported, Cinnamon looks arguably better with the dark vertex theme and Nitrux icons, everything (except Libreoffice) was just there, and Cinnamon was the latest stable version (2.4.8). It just works or at least THE WAY I WaNT IT TO. I installed Linux-CK and the Brain Fuck Schedular is great. Somehow my laptop feels that much faster with it. And get this? It's in a repo, so need to recompile the kernel (an arguably useful practice)! Currently Linux-CK is at version 4.0.4-3, so it's the latest stable release. Yaourt as I mentioned is awesome, Pacman is great, and depite it not being Arch purely, I don't give a $hit. Once again it just works. Octopi is like Mint Update, I love the syntaxes used by Pacman as it feels like Zypper in that respect. I'm not sure really how I should go one so I'm just going to post a couple of Manjaro wallpapers I made in GIMP, and a screenshot:


https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_uXgn68zsudU2F5eUtEcDNvRVE/view?usp=sharing
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_uXgn68zsudcUZJNUw5cjNqbGc/view?usp=sharing

Edit: The theme in the creenshot above is Menda Dark with Menda Circle icons.

Edit 2: Here is the link to the original thread as to give credit where it is due:
https://forum.manjaro.org/index.php?topic=21319.0

1 Like

So this is interesting. The Vertex theme broke when Cinnamon updated from 2.4.6 to 2.4.8. I believe it has to do with newer GTK engines (3.14 as opposed to 3.16). I'll look.at it later today. Menda is too green. For those who build packages, I highly recommend the AUR. It would allow Arch based users to test your package as you throw updates at it without you needing your own repo or something:

https://aur.archlinux.org/

If your package is good enough it may make it into Pacman's repository. To install a package from the AUR run:

yaourt packagename (do not use yaourt with root privileges!)

Huh. It looks like Vertex was updated to the 3.16 engines back in late March. Maybe the release was finished before it made the update:

Have you gave Korora a try?

seems like it has the features you want.

https://kororaproject.org/

So manjaro has Mp3 support out of the box? I thought you had to install that.

Too bad you could not get cinnamon on opensuse. You might be interested to hear that cinnamon is supposed to be a semi official DE for fedora 22 though. : )

Lastly, does the BF scheduler really make that big of a difference? I have tried it a few times, and I really did not notice a bit of difference. Maybe I am doing it wrong.

Yeah. I prefer the rolling release model of Manjaro though. It's not perfect, but it's close. I actually used Korora awhile back, and loved it. I just didn't care for the fact that releases were about a month after Fedora's.

BFS has a significant effect on performance with high work loads, and older hardware (my case with my laptop). I was able to play MP3s out of the box without hassle... by that could easily be that it is a community release. If Cinnamon is supposed to be semi official in Fedora 22 I may try it. Fedora was my favorite OS for awhile back when I started using Linux.

Interestingly I found this:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Cinnamon_Spin#Download_tab

So a Cinnamon spin may very well be underway.

I could never get into fedora while I like RPM packages which is odd.

Same. I think RPM fits rolling releases better. I like Fedora but why it over SUSE? What benefits does it offer (actual question here)? I honestly couldn't find any.

Is this really it?:

openSUSE was founded in part as a response to Fedora and hence has many similarities

Similarities:

Like Fedora, openSUSE uses RPM as a package manager

openSUSE also has a time based release model although Fedora has a new release every six months and openSUSE has a new release every nine months instead

openSUSE has adopted the Fedora trademark license agreement with a few minor differences

openSUSE has in large part adopted the Fedora Packaging guidelines as well

Differences:

openSUSE uses the zypper dependency resolver instead of yum although yum is available in the openSUSE repository.

openSUSE is freely available but also sold as a retail boxed product with limited commercial support from Novell while Fedora is a community project with no retail business.

Source: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Comparison_to_other_distributions

Yeah, that's basically it.

Opensuse is fedora with some extra bits.

Zypper is far superior to yum, however fedora 22 has dnf which is supposed to be more like zypper.

Opensuse also has Yast and 1 click install which have both saved my ass plenty of times.

If fedora can implement 1 click install and something like yast. Opensuse would be dead in the water.

I really like YaST and SuseStudio and it has the easiest GUI for KVM and Xen.

And zypper can use both Yum and APT commands.

Yeah, although I never understood the point of using apt in opensuse.

I've always loved SUSE, and it probabally is on par with Manjaro in terms of being my favorite. I just felt as if it was too automated, and I wanted to get closer to the command line while not having to constantly maintain my system. If I had five computers sitting around at least three of them would be running SUSE (man I wish I wouldn't have broke my S key on my laptop).I was just thinking about this, and why isn't Fedora a rolling release? Yeah, there's rawhide, but that is highly unstable (nearly as bad as Debian unstable). It would put developers closer to their software whilst providing the latest tools.

Huh. The Screenshot tool is broke...

See I do not totally agree with you. The awesome thing about opensuse is that it can be as difficult or easy as you want it to be.

If you wanna do crazy things like recompile the kernel from scratch or modify packages to do random ass things, you can.

If you wanna be completely lazy and just use yast and 1 click install, you can.

There is very little you can not do, and it is totally up to you on how you want to experience the OS.

Annnnnnnnnnddddddddd this is why I do not use arch.

Every other day I find something else is broken.

That's part of the fun though :). I enjoyed it when packages broke on Tumbleweed because it gave me something to try and fix, or a topic to make a bug report. I can see your views on the whole it's a easy or hard as you want it be thing though. I just figured I'd learn more.

Oh, I also forgot to mention, fedora is a quasi rolling release.

It's more like what solydXK does where they have a quarterly release but this is obviously a 6 month release.

Any time the OS branches off into a new release, you can just enable those repos instead of the rawhide ones.

So you would essentially be using beta software instead of super alpha software.

You can also enable certain repos that will update the kernel more frequently and so on.

So you do have options other than rawhide, but it is up to you to choose how you want to implement them.

When Fedora 22 comes out I'll look at it. It sounds very interesting in terms of package management. I just wish Suse had full Cinnamon support! Can I file that as a bug or something? I know it may not be implemented until 13.4 or whatever, but I need it. I know I could use SUSE Studio, but it just wouldn't be right because I wouldn't be doing anything hands on, and it could become tedious.