Manjaro Moving Ahead With Snap Support, Bundling Proprietary FreeOffice

[polarathene]

after a while new users will move toward other distros that are better balanced for an advanced use. The more those try to be easier the more those will lose, sooner or later, their users...

Eh, I've been with Manjaro since late 2016. It's fairly nice, I'm more advanced since and may consider migrating to another distro or just making modifications for my own personal preference(this is supported in making a custom spin/ISO).

I've had a few issues with updates where the maintainers deviated from upstream, but also some issues where upstream(Arch) introduced updates that weren't a good time. Still a big fan of AUR, but unless I could get something like Fedora's SilverBlue or openSUSE's transactional r/o snapshots for system updates, I might consider moving off Arch-based distros.

While the kernel/driver management UIs are nice, it doesn't seem that DKMS is supported for nvidia driver, so you have to be careful with your kernels and keep a recent LTS around, else Manjaro makes it difficult to update when they EOL kernels you have if you've been away for months(eg traveling) and thus not kept up to date. The live installer image runs a systemd service during boot that fails on QEMU/KVM UEFI based VMs, it attempts to initialize graphics as BIOS/VGA instead for some reason which fails, you have to disable it with boot params at GRUB and let X handle it correctly.

All that aside, they're pretty well known user friendly distro with good community if you want a rolling release, and access to the AUR which is great. If they keep the user around and happy long enough, it results in word of mouth and keeps the distro going. I'm personally not fond of all the extras they're installing by default(there is other stuff before this like the MS office 360 online app shortcuts for example). If they want to install them by default, cool, but at least allow opt-out during installer(they maintain Calamares too, so I don't see why they couldn't offer it).

[polarathene]

Snap is just not anywhere near as good as flatpak, especially in theming and speeds (particularly on a non-ubuntu system).

They're offering both, what's the issue? It's probably going to be transparent through this app though, a user wants an app and searches for it(no idea what happens when the app has both snap and flatpak(not sure what Gnome Software or KDE Discover do, those also include local system package too I think?).

What might happen, is the mix of snap, flatpak and local packages, in addition to GTK/Qt is more "fragmentation"/inconsistency, which is not a good thing. If they're able to avoid that being noticeable then great. I don't really get the point of why there is another app installer catering to these, since the existing Gnome/KDE specific ones support both with either GTK or Qt interface and their own DE integration when available.

I assume it's a Manjaro project or something similar to how they've built Pamac and been making that DE agnostic(Qt interface in the works), rather than use an existing AUR helper, they implemented their own internal one, yet haven't integrated anything that would warn users about potential issues with an update(or at the very least linking them to the forum to review).

And what's wrong with libreoffice? Sure, for more advanced word documents, there are some rendering issues, but it's perfectly capable even with those issues.

It wasn't the last few times I've tried to use it with colleagues MS office files. Especially for power point presentations, those were epically broken. Similar problems with their word documents being a mess iirc. Another one had issue with the interface and made a good case for it(I can't recall as it's been a while), stuff you wouldn't really notice was an issue unless you had enough experience to use the programs beyond the basics.

[polarathene]

A great reason to not use this shitty distro. The idea of bundling an office suite by default by itself is silly, not to mention how ridiculous it is to pick a proprietary one.

It's not silly. If you're new to Linux, you may very well have a need for office type software(many I have shown Linux to have), but MS Office isn't really an option(bit of a mess with WINE and the online version doesn't necessarily count). So if you can't offer the same software they are familiar with, they've got to find an alternative. A new OS can be daunting enough as it is, let alone know what is good to go with.

There's OpenOffice and LibreOffice, depending on search results/reviews they come across, they might think OpenOffice is still a good choice, or they realize LibreOffice is the better one but later find out that it's awkward compared to the MS suite, and compatibility is often poor. So what? Now they gotta go through that song/dance again. That can be time consuming and frustrating when you just want to get shit done. Shipping an office suite by default, reduces the whole paralysis analysis experience, they'll give it a go, and if it's adequate, might be happy enough with it.

Many new users don't give any shits if it's proprietary or not, they just want something that works well. Assume you're on a machine where nvidia is the only GPU. Do you A, go with the proprietary driver or B the open-source nouveau driver?(assume your GPU is Pascal or greater). Would you A be happy that the distro provided the proprietary drivers out of the box(especially if you're a new user and don't have any familiarity with the driver situation), or B find the nouveau experience enjoyable as shit doesn't work properly and has rendering issues? If you chose B, I guarantee that the majority of users will deem Linux as a buggy piece of shit and run back to Windows/macOS.

As someone else has hinted, it's also possible that the company has sponsored Manjaro to include it I guess.

Where is git in these distros?

You have git by default with it, you're just assuming that it didn't have that? :S

[polarathene]

This isn't about adding support, but bundling it on a default install.

How many distros install Steam by default?

Manjaro does. So this shouldn't come as a surprise? Supplies proprietary drivers upfront for installs too.

Not that I'm particularly fond of this decision. I wouldn't mind if it was opt-out during install.

I don't really see the point in Snaps on a rolling distro with large repos, but more power to the user I guess.

Proprietary support mostly. As in it makes it easier for companies to support Linux through Snap or Flatpak. Snap however seems to have more mindshare to proprietary devs, or just more available. For example, a popular electron packaging tooling supports both Snap and AppImage but lacks Flatpak support, I can't recall the exact reason, I think there might have been some issue in adding the support or it was just a lack of someone contributing it, there was also 2 or 3 different ways(as in type of packaging/output result) in supporting Flatpak I think so it wasn't clear cut.

[cynical]

Is anyone in corporat/cloud/iot using Snap at all?

And I mean really using it. not just bundling applications that "work for me" in a specific Ubuntu LTS and break everywhere else (i.e. still relying 100% on system libs, sometimes even relying on default installed packages because they can't be arsed to add a dependency list to their package)?

Uh, Amazon?

[cynical]

I don't really see the point in Snaps on a rolling distro with large repos, but more power to the user I guess.

Things like Slack that aren't available in the repos, for one.

[Danielsan]

Eh, I've been with Manjaro since late 2016. It's fairly nice, I'm more advanced since and may consider migrating to another distro or just making modifications for my own personal preference(this is supported in making a custom spin/ISO).

It is natural leaving a derivatives for a main Linux distro. At a certain point derivatives start to be limited for your needs, power users use this derivatives only on machines where they don't have time to setup the system and need a ready-to-go distro.

[Guest]

I care about Wayland, so your statement is invalid

You've missed the joke. I'm saying that Wayland has as much chances of taking of as Mir.

[Guest]

Assume you're on a machine where nvidia is the only GPU. Do you A, go with the proprietary driver or B the open-source nouveau driver?(assume your GPU is Pascal or greater).

By now, on-die integrated graphics are common, and you'd have to build a really dumb build to not have an integrated chip to fall back to. GPUs from times of Core 2 Duo where you might not have something integrated will have GPUs so old that they're effectively deprecated (340 is supported until end of this year, but they've been falling behind X.org releases for over a year now, making it unusable).

You're better off using Intel graphics and getting a driver that works and follows standards rather than wasting tine with Nvidia.

You have git by default with it, you're just assuming that it didn't have that? :S

I made that assumption based on my experiences with Ubuntu.

[aasami]

Why not OnlyOffice? Is free and opensource and in my opinion - one of the best compatibile with MS Office formats.
In my opinion WPS Office (preprietary) and OnlyOffice provide the best compatibility.

WPS Office can only be used in China. Read their EULA:
(3) If this Software is a WPS Office version for Linux OS, the following applly

1. 1) You are only entitled to install and use this Software on computers meeting the following operating environment requirements as agreed herein:
   • OS: Linux OS produced by China brand enterprises, such as Ubuntu or Ubentu Kylin, Deepin, NeoKylin, NFS China, and New Start
   • CPU: X86 or CPU produced by China enterprises such as Loongson, Phytium, SW, Zhaoxin, and MPRC