Start recommending Monjaro
*to newbies
Ever since I have had old laptops lying around, I have started to tinker with the various distro of Linux. My first distro was ubuntu which I had dual-booted on a windows machine with a partition of 33% of available memory.
As time went on I started using the ubuntu boot more and more and one day realized I only use windows to play steam games so there’s a very little portion of my time spent with the windows on my pc.
If I could just play dota2 on ubuntu windows would be completely useless. So I tried steam on ubuntu and to my surprise with a maybe 5-10fps less. I was fairly smooth.
Now that I was sold on the complete idea of Linux as my daily driver and the only OS I was going to use from now on. Another irrelevant question came to my mind.
“Does it get better than this?” — Some guys using ubuntu
It does. There are over 600 and 500 in active development. This is not even counting the meme distros. So I went and looked and sweet jeebus there are some weird ones, for example:
- Red Star Linux— The official OS for North Korea (the best Korea)
- Justin Beaver Linux— The Justin Beiber distro?
- Suicide Linux — A Debian-based distro for the perfect typist. Any time you type any remotely incorrect command, the interpreter creatively resolves it into rm -rf / and wipes your hard drive.
Also, Pro tip if anyone trash talks Linux say these magical words to them
“NO AUTOMATIC UPDATES”
But I digress, my detour originally was on distrowatch. And since I was a ubuntu user I looked for the next thing. The most popular was Debian based (same as ubuntu). So I chose the 2 on the list Manjaro. If you ever worked with ubuntu apt is your package manager. Manjaro is Arch based(with systemd). So it uses Pacman as it’s a default package manager. The first thing that caught my eye was how differently any software was installed in Manjaro. Pull stuff from the repo directly or if it's community take a git clone and build it yourself.
I know that sounds intimidating but if we look at how many times we had to add ppe’s and other run other scripts isn’t it better to know where your stuff is coming from. For manjaro it’s from AUR which is a package repository maintained by an army of ‘I use arch btw’. Don’t worry you’ll get that joke in a week into working with any arch based distro. And most of the forums and answer are always available.
BTW did I tell you Arch and distros based on it are rolling release. Never will you ever need to reinstall a newer version of your current operating system.
To sum it up in a few words, Manjaro is ideal for those that crave granular customization and access to extra packages in the AUR. Ubuntu is better for those that want convenience and stability(At a basic level). Underneath their monikers and differences in approach, they’re both still Linux. Both of them are highly praised distributions, so it probably won’t be that troubling to have one or the other.