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I personally would avoid anything Manjaro related due to recurring controversies around the project leadership: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/hxpj87/

I personally would avoid anything Manjaro related due to recurring controversies around the project leadership: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/hxpj87/change_in_manjaro_team_composition_announcements/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/hxpj87/change_in_man... I wish PinePhone would partner with Arch or Debian instead.

glenstein 6y ago
I share this concern. Their own treasurer raised a concern as to whether community donated funds were handled according to the process they had put in place. For a period of time while this was happening, they responded by hiding forum threads about the subject. Eventually the treasurer parted ways with the team, and although they claim they didn't kick their treasurer out, their treasurer felt more or less like they had no choice but to leave, feeling effectively kicked out. Their apparent respect for their own stated internal practices was basically non-existent and their way of addressing concern raised does not appear to have been great, and their attempt to shut down discussion without explaining anything was bad, and when they did make a statement it did not feel entirely forthright or comprehensive, and it was different in many ways from what the treasurer had said, making it hard to figure out what really happened. It doesn't appear that any money was used in an improper way (all valid project-related costs, no tickets to Disneyland), only that it was not reviewed + processed consistently with their own internal policies. The management wants to emphasize the 'no improper use' part, which is fair enough so far as it goes. But it does not make them appear trustworthy should there be a real question in the future where we need to rely on their version of events to get to the bottom of something. Related discussion on lemmy: https://dev.lemmy.ml/post/38078 https://dev.lemmy.ml/post/38078
- Zancarius 6y ago
  ...and it's not even just the controversies. Manjaro feels like they play fast and loose with everything. Arch doesn't include AUR helpers by default specifically because of the potential for user-generated packages to install malware or do something damaging (with the intent being that if you want to use the AUR you really ought to understand the implications). Manjaro not only includes AUR helpers--it seems to actively encourage its use for packages not officially maintained. Though, in their defense, their wiki page does (finally?) include fair warnings borrowed from Arch[1]. I'm just not sure it shares the same visibility. Otherwise it feels like a parasitic project masquerading as "Arch but easier." While there is truth to the latter, the oddly curious aspect to me--having been helping newbie Linux users for a couple years now--is that it seems new users generally have more long-term problems with Manjaro than they do with Arch. I don't have any facts to back this up, but speaking from my own anecdotes one would think the "easier" distro wouldn't be subject to this sort of trouble. Also, they recently lost all of their support forum images earlier this month[2]. [1] https://wiki.manjaro.org/index.php/Arch_User_Repository https://wiki.manjaro.org/index.php/Arch_User_Repository [2] https://linuxreviews.org/Manjaro_Linux_Lost_All_Of_Their_Support_Forum_Images https://linuxreviews.org/Manjaro_Linux_Lost_All_Of_Their_Sup...
  - shrimp_emoji 6y ago
    Unfortunately, the only other easy distro is Ubuntu, and not having the AUR or the Arch wiki or the quite good Manjaro forums and having to use potentially-dead PPAs for things because Ubuntu packages are out of date is less easy.
    - Zancarius 6y ago
      I do agree that "easy" isn't a solved space in the Linux world (Pop!_OS by System 76 is supposed to be quite good albeit also Ubuntu-based). I don't think that necessarily absolves problems with the AUR or including AUR helpers out of the box. I do understand that the AUR is incredibly useful for a wide(r?) array of software, but I take issue with Manjaro's approach of foisting it on potentially unsuspecting users who may not know enough to understand that these are user-maintained packages that anyone could upload. I'd say I don't think it's a particularly responsible thing to do, but Manjaro's approach seems to eschew caution, throwing it entirely to the wind. But, I confess it could be because I'm a long time Arch user protecting the status quo. I understand that the traditional approach (install base-devel, copy the target PKGBUILD, run makepkg, run pacman -U) is an obstacle to a lot of users. That said, I think it's a good thing because the community repo has a ton of commonly used software (maintained by TUs) so there isn't a huge requirement on diving into the AUR now as there was 5 years ago. My fear is that encouraging people to blindly install PKGBUILDs via yay or pamac will eventually nail someone.
    - bleepblorp 6y ago
      The OpenSUSE distros--Leap and Tumbleweed--don't get a lot of attention but they're worthy, relatively easy to use, alternatives to Ubuntu and Arch respectively. Leap is an LTS distro that is more up to date than Ubuntu LTS and Tumbleweed is a rolling release that has enough QA that it doesn't blow up as frequently as Arch.
      - COGlory 6y ago
        I just installed OpenSUSE on 7 computers over the last month. On my personal ones, I was previously running Kubuntu, then Manjaro, and now OpenSUSE. On work ones, most were on CentOS 7. I installed Tumbleweed on the personal ones, including a laptop, and Leap on the work ones. Overall my experience has been great and I love OpenSUSE. However, I definitely would not recommend them for beginners for a few reasons. Tumbleweed doesn't support certain browser video out of the box in Firefox. I had to enable a repository, and download libav packages to get it to work. The package names were confusing (why do I need libav 56 and 57 when 58 is already installed?). I had already installed the packages from the default repo, but they specifically needed to be installed from Packman. GUI scaling between different displays is completely broken on Leap. Certain things scale, other things don't, and it looks horrible. Normally, I get super annoyed when people take little things like that and make a huge issue out of them. They are little problems and I solved both of them, and love OPENS USE. But with Manjaro, I didn't have any problems from fresh install. Even switchable laptop graphics worked. Manjaro is very easy to recommend to someone afraid to open a terminal.
MarcellusDrum 6y ago
Came here to say this. I respect both communities like KDE and companies like RedHat (before it was acquired). But when call yourself a community but act more like a company (and a toxic one at that) is where you lose all my respect.
mikece 6y ago
The drama of Manjaro leadership notwithstanding, does the distro work on the phone?
- hcal 6y ago
  Yes, while YMMV, I've found it to be in or near the top tier of images as far as hardware support for the pinephone. All the top distros are developed in the open so they tend to improve together. Like all distros on the phone, Manjaro breaks sometimes but they are doing a pretty good job. I've had the best luck with Mobian, but Manjaro and Fedora were a close second.
- ekianjo 6y ago
  YOu can find more info here: https://boilingsteam.com/the-pinephone-can-it-replace-your-smartphone/ https://boilingsteam.com/the-pinephone-can-it-replace-your-s...
federico33 6y ago
> I wish PinePhone would partner with Arch or Debian instead. The Mobian[1] project (Debian for PinePhone) is doing very well. A Mobian PinePhone edition is possible - but in the meantime people can install the OS on existing PinePhones. [1] https://mobian-project.org/ https://mobian-project.org/
- yorwba 6y ago
  Also various other Linux distros: https://wiki.pine64.org/index.php?title=PinePhone_Software_Releases#Software_Releases https://wiki.pine64.org/index.php?title=PinePhone_Software_R...
deepstack 6y ago
I wish PinePhone would partner with Arch or Debian instead. Word. Debian is great! In the past when I see people using Ubuntu, I always wondered why? It is so interesting how people in tech just fall into the fashion trap.
- msla 6y ago
  Because coming from Slackware and OpenBSD, Debian's install process was too big of a pain to deal with.
- ISL 6y ago
  My probably-flawed remembrance of the situation, as a Debian (2001+)/Gentoo(2004-8) user: Canonical showed up to the party with a substantial concerted and sustained effort of funding/developers to take the existing Debian framework and make it more user-friendly. In particular, Ubuntu was willing to package substantially non-free software into the experience. Things like Flash just worked most of the time. There was a substantial emphasis on usability, so that Linux-on-the-desktop could reach people with less background knowledge (everyone was doing this, of course, but Ubuntu seemed to put less emphasis on other things). When Ubuntu emerged, Debian users were concerned that Ubuntu would take over the DFSG-software world and make it, in the long run, less free. What turned out to happen, in this case, was that the approachability of Ubuntu, built atop the Debian foundation, drew many more users away from RedHat/Fedora and ultimately strengthened the Debian/Ubuntu userbase and ecosystem. The usability really mattered -- I've repaired the occasional Debian system with Ubuntu boot-disks simply because the drivers, at the time, worked better. Thanks to the intrinsic properties of open-source development, many of the good things about Ubuntu have found their way into Debian (and GNU/Linux at large). The Debian of today is a much more-readily usable experience than the Debian of 2004 thanks to the work of a great many people.
  - Foxboron 6y ago
    This is also thanks to Ubuntus commitment to contribute back to Debian and ensure there is a synergy. The same can't be said for Manjaro. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Ubuntu/ForDebianDevelopers https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Ubuntu/ForDebianDevelopers
ohazi 6y ago
Not having used Manjaro personally, what's the advantage here? My impression was that it was essentially Arch with a user friendly installer and possibly some nicer defaults. This seems desirable if you're setting up a PC, but is there really added value there if you're building a ROM image for a phone? It seems like you'd be doing a ton of manual installing and configuring anyway, since it's such an unusual target compared to a typical desktop, regardless of cpu architecture...
- Wheaties466 6y ago
  I have used manjaro on my personal laptop for the past 4+ years and I share the same sentiment. Great for a computer but I'm not sure what value is added on the pine phone.
  - fsflover 6y ago
    Convergence?
  - megous 6y ago
    What all of these distros basically do is some non-trivial amount of integration of existing software, and configuring/patching it for PinePhone, presumably. Not sure about manjaro specifically, but it looks like it will be another phosh based distro. Their forum will probably have more info eventually: https://forum.manjaro.org/t/pinephone-will-ship-with-manjaro-next/18369/4 https://forum.manjaro.org/t/pinephone-will-ship-with-manjaro...
m463 6y ago
Isn't arch on arm a different group? I know their website doesn't work without talking to google.
JeremyNT 6y ago
> I wish PinePhone would partner with Arch or Debian instead. I exclusively use Arch on my other computers, so I initially put the upstream Arch ARM on my PinePhone, but it's just not in a state that most users (even tinkerers) would be inclined to work with. Manjaro and some of the other distributions are close to fully functional. I'm sure Pine64 would love to partner with Arch ARM (or any distribution) that would like to focus on providing a good user experience on the device. IMO, Postmarket OS provides the best experience on the device at this time.

glenstein 6y ago

I share this concern. Their own treasurer raised a concern as to whether community donated funds were handled according to the process they had put in place. For a period of time while this was happening, they responded by hiding forum threads about the subject. Eventually the treasurer parted ways with the team, and although they claim they didn't kick their treasurer out, their treasurer felt more or less like they had no choice but to leave, feeling effectively kicked out. Their apparent respect for their own stated internal practices was basically non-existent and their way of addressing concern raised does not appear to have been great, and their attempt to shut down discussion without explaining anything was bad, and when they did make a statement it did not feel entirely forthright or comprehensive, and it was different in many ways from what the treasurer had said, making it hard to figure out what really happened. It doesn't appear that any money was used in an improper way (all valid project-related costs, no tickets to Disneyland), only that it was not reviewed + processed consistently with their own internal policies. The management wants to emphasize the 'no improper use' part, which is fair enough so far as it goes. But it does not make them appear trustworthy should there be a real question in the future where we need to rely on their version of events to get to the bottom of something. Related discussion on lemmy: https://dev.lemmy.ml/post/38078 https://dev.lemmy.ml/post/38078

Zancarius 6y ago
...and it's not even just the controversies. Manjaro feels like they play fast and loose with everything. Arch doesn't include AUR helpers by default specifically because of the potential for user-generated packages to install malware or do something damaging (with the intent being that if you want to use the AUR you really ought to understand the implications). Manjaro not only includes AUR helpers--it seems to actively encourage its use for packages not officially maintained. Though, in their defense, their wiki page does (finally?) include fair warnings borrowed from Arch[1]. I'm just not sure it shares the same visibility. Otherwise it feels like a parasitic project masquerading as "Arch but easier." While there is truth to the latter, the oddly curious aspect to me--having been helping newbie Linux users for a couple years now--is that it seems new users generally have more long-term problems with Manjaro than they do with Arch. I don't have any facts to back this up, but speaking from my own anecdotes one would think the "easier" distro wouldn't be subject to this sort of trouble. Also, they recently lost all of their support forum images earlier this month[2]. [1] https://wiki.manjaro.org/index.php/Arch_User_Repository https://wiki.manjaro.org/index.php/Arch_User_Repository [2] https://linuxreviews.org/Manjaro_Linux_Lost_All_Of_Their_Support_Forum_Images https://linuxreviews.org/Manjaro_Linux_Lost_All_Of_Their_Sup...
- shrimp_emoji 6y ago
  Unfortunately, the only other easy distro is Ubuntu, and not having the AUR or the Arch wiki or the quite good Manjaro forums and having to use potentially-dead PPAs for things because Ubuntu packages are out of date is less easy.
  - Zancarius 6y ago
    I do agree that "easy" isn't a solved space in the Linux world (Pop!_OS by System 76 is supposed to be quite good albeit also Ubuntu-based). I don't think that necessarily absolves problems with the AUR or including AUR helpers out of the box. I do understand that the AUR is incredibly useful for a wide(r?) array of software, but I take issue with Manjaro's approach of foisting it on potentially unsuspecting users who may not know enough to understand that these are user-maintained packages that anyone could upload. I'd say I don't think it's a particularly responsible thing to do, but Manjaro's approach seems to eschew caution, throwing it entirely to the wind. But, I confess it could be because I'm a long time Arch user protecting the status quo. I understand that the traditional approach (install base-devel, copy the target PKGBUILD, run makepkg, run pacman -U) is an obstacle to a lot of users. That said, I think it's a good thing because the community repo has a ton of commonly used software (maintained by TUs) so there isn't a huge requirement on diving into the AUR now as there was 5 years ago. My fear is that encouraging people to blindly install PKGBUILDs via yay or pamac will eventually nail someone.
  - bleepblorp 6y ago
    The OpenSUSE distros--Leap and Tumbleweed--don't get a lot of attention but they're worthy, relatively easy to use, alternatives to Ubuntu and Arch respectively. Leap is an LTS distro that is more up to date than Ubuntu LTS and Tumbleweed is a rolling release that has enough QA that it doesn't blow up as frequently as Arch.
    - COGlory 6y ago
      I just installed OpenSUSE on 7 computers over the last month. On my personal ones, I was previously running Kubuntu, then Manjaro, and now OpenSUSE. On work ones, most were on CentOS 7. I installed Tumbleweed on the personal ones, including a laptop, and Leap on the work ones. Overall my experience has been great and I love OpenSUSE. However, I definitely would not recommend them for beginners for a few reasons. Tumbleweed doesn't support certain browser video out of the box in Firefox. I had to enable a repository, and download libav packages to get it to work. The package names were confusing (why do I need libav 56 and 57 when 58 is already installed?). I had already installed the packages from the default repo, but they specifically needed to be installed from Packman. GUI scaling between different displays is completely broken on Leap. Certain things scale, other things don't, and it looks horrible. Normally, I get super annoyed when people take little things like that and make a huge issue out of them. They are little problems and I solved both of them, and love OPENS USE. But with Manjaro, I didn't have any problems from fresh install. Even switchable laptop graphics worked. Manjaro is very easy to recommend to someone afraid to open a terminal.

MarcellusDrum 6y ago

Came here to say this. I respect both communities like KDE and companies like RedHat (before it was acquired). But when call yourself a community but act more like a company (and a toxic one at that) is where you lose all my respect.

mikece 6y ago

The drama of Manjaro leadership notwithstanding, does the distro work on the phone?

hcal 6y ago
Yes, while YMMV, I've found it to be in or near the top tier of images as far as hardware support for the pinephone. All the top distros are developed in the open so they tend to improve together. Like all distros on the phone, Manjaro breaks sometimes but they are doing a pretty good job. I've had the best luck with Mobian, but Manjaro and Fedora were a close second.
ekianjo 6y ago
YOu can find more info here: https://boilingsteam.com/the-pinephone-can-it-replace-your-smartphone/ https://boilingsteam.com/the-pinephone-can-it-replace-your-s...

federico33 6y ago

> I wish PinePhone would partner with Arch or Debian instead. The Mobian[1] project (Debian for PinePhone) is doing very well. A Mobian PinePhone edition is possible - but in the meantime people can install the OS on existing PinePhones. [1] https://mobian-project.org/ https://mobian-project.org/

yorwba 6y ago
Also various other Linux distros: https://wiki.pine64.org/index.php?title=PinePhone_Software_Releases#Software_Releases https://wiki.pine64.org/index.php?title=PinePhone_Software_R...

deepstack 6y ago

I wish PinePhone would partner with Arch or Debian instead. Word. Debian is great! In the past when I see people using Ubuntu, I always wondered why? It is so interesting how people in tech just fall into the fashion trap.

msla 6y ago
Because coming from Slackware and OpenBSD, Debian's install process was too big of a pain to deal with.
ISL 6y ago
My probably-flawed remembrance of the situation, as a Debian (2001+)/Gentoo(2004-8) user: Canonical showed up to the party with a substantial concerted and sustained effort of funding/developers to take the existing Debian framework and make it more user-friendly. In particular, Ubuntu was willing to package substantially non-free software into the experience. Things like Flash just worked most of the time. There was a substantial emphasis on usability, so that Linux-on-the-desktop could reach people with less background knowledge (everyone was doing this, of course, but Ubuntu seemed to put less emphasis on other things). When Ubuntu emerged, Debian users were concerned that Ubuntu would take over the DFSG-software world and make it, in the long run, less free. What turned out to happen, in this case, was that the approachability of Ubuntu, built atop the Debian foundation, drew many more users away from RedHat/Fedora and ultimately strengthened the Debian/Ubuntu userbase and ecosystem. The usability really mattered -- I've repaired the occasional Debian system with Ubuntu boot-disks simply because the drivers, at the time, worked better. Thanks to the intrinsic properties of open-source development, many of the good things about Ubuntu have found their way into Debian (and GNU/Linux at large). The Debian of today is a much more-readily usable experience than the Debian of 2004 thanks to the work of a great many people.
- Foxboron 6y ago
  This is also thanks to Ubuntus commitment to contribute back to Debian and ensure there is a synergy. The same can't be said for Manjaro. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Ubuntu/ForDebianDevelopers https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Ubuntu/ForDebianDevelopers

ohazi 6y ago

Not having used Manjaro personally, what's the advantage here? My impression was that it was essentially Arch with a user friendly installer and possibly some nicer defaults. This seems desirable if you're setting up a PC, but is there really added value there if you're building a ROM image for a phone? It seems like you'd be doing a ton of manual installing and configuring anyway, since it's such an unusual target compared to a typical desktop, regardless of cpu architecture...

Wheaties466 6y ago
I have used manjaro on my personal laptop for the past 4+ years and I share the same sentiment. Great for a computer but I'm not sure what value is added on the pine phone.
- fsflover 6y ago
  Convergence?
- megous 6y ago
  What all of these distros basically do is some non-trivial amount of integration of existing software, and configuring/patching it for PinePhone, presumably. Not sure about manjaro specifically, but it looks like it will be another phosh based distro. Their forum will probably have more info eventually: https://forum.manjaro.org/t/pinephone-will-ship-with-manjaro-next/18369/4 https://forum.manjaro.org/t/pinephone-will-ship-with-manjaro...

m463 6y ago

Isn't arch on arm a different group? I know their website doesn't work without talking to google.

JeremyNT 6y ago

> I wish PinePhone would partner with Arch or Debian instead. I exclusively use Arch on my other computers, so I initially put the upstream Arch ARM on my PinePhone, but it's just not in a state that most users (even tinkerers) would be inclined to work with. Manjaro and some of the other distributions are close to fully functional. I'm sure Pine64 would love to partner with Arch ARM (or any distribution) that would like to focus on providing a good user experience on the device. IMO, Postmarket OS provides the best experience on the device at this time.