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