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).

[muncrief]

Might give OpenSUSE Leap a try. It's relatively conservative (far more so than its counterpart Fedora) but tends to keep reasonably up-to-date userland. My major quibble with it around 13.1 or so is that sound configuration on an older desktop was such a hassle that I gave up on it (multiple external USB devices + primary internal audio) because YAST was constantly getting in the way of audio "just working" - as opposed to Ubuntu 16.04 working out-of-the-box.

One caveat: brand new CPUs may not have stellar support. Leap uses the same kernel as the enterprise version which is based on 4.12 + backports from 4.19 for drivers. Unfortunately for my own personal use this isn't good enough. My laptop's 8300H Intel CPU causes certain module oopses and the nouveau driver must be blacklisted (Nvidia 1060 Max Q Optimus) entirely or the laptop will completely hang on kernel initialization. I've been using Kubuntu 18.04.2 on it instead which has kernel 4.18.x and seems stable (again blacklisting nouveau on boot till the Nvidia drivers are properly installed).

Thank you for taking the time to reply, I appreciate your suggestion. I did look at OpenSUSE a short time ago and it's just too much back porting for me. I'd have problems with it under any circumstance, but since I have an R9 390 GPU it just wouldn't work. It's bad enough with the latest kernel and open source drivers, and the old kernel OpenSUSE uses can't be back ported to fully support it because the changes required are too significant.

[stormcrow]

I like Manjaro, and over time have found it has the best balance of up to date software without being too buggy, and ease of use.

...
But this FreeOffice thing is just wrong. The purpose of FreeOffice is to lure people into buying proprietary software, and that's where I draw a line. I was already disturbed by the MS Office Online shortcut, but decided to live with it because it was only a shortcut. But like I said, this is different and I'm going to seriously look at other distros again. The problem is I just went through a cycle of that, and even tried Ubuntu again, so I really don't know if there's any reasonable alternative.

Might give OpenSUSE Leap a try. It's relatively conservative (far more so than its counterpart Fedora) but tends to keep reasonably up-to-date userland. My major quibble with it around 13.1 or so is that sound configuration on an older desktop was such a hassle that I gave up on it (multiple external USB devices + primary internal audio) because YAST was constantly getting in the way of audio "just working" - as opposed to Ubuntu 16.04 working out-of-the-box.

One caveat: brand new CPUs may not have stellar support. Leap uses the same kernel as the enterprise version which is based on 4.12 + backports from 4.19 for drivers. Unfortunately for my own personal use this isn't good enough. My laptop's 8300H Intel CPU causes certain module oopses and the nouveau driver must be blacklisted (Nvidia 1060 Max Q Optimus) entirely or the laptop will completely hang on kernel initialization. I've been using Kubuntu 18.04.2 on it instead which has kernel 4.18.x and seems stable (again blacklisting nouveau on boot till the Nvidia drivers are properly installed).

[muncrief]

I like Manjaro, and over time have found it has the best balance of up to date software without being too buggy, and ease of use.

And no, I'm not a newbie, I've been using Linux since the early 2000s. I know many people don't like Manjaro because it's not "pure" Arch, but to each his own. I've tried Arch numerous times and just don't see the point in having to set up every tiny bit of Linux, only to have it often break because of blind update releases. I'm just too old to go through all that nonsense anymore. I don't need my OS to be a challenge, or brag to people that I'm "smart enough" to make it work, I just want it to work out of the box as well as possible.

But this FreeOffice thing is just wrong. The purpose of FreeOffice is to lure people into buying proprietary software, and that's where I draw a line. I was already disturbed by the MS Office Online shortcut, but decided to live with it because it was only a shortcut. But like I said, this is different and I'm going to seriously look at other distros again. The problem is I just went through a cycle of that, and even tried Ubuntu again, so I really don't know if there's any reasonable alternative.

[Templar82]

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

[starshipeleven]

A package manager that deals with source only is inefficient and not "easy to use" when compile errors occur.

It was a joke. Gentoo is probably the hardest distro possible for a newcomer and as such "install Gentoo" is a common joke to people suggesting other hard distros like Arch when someone asks about a easy distro, and also a meme for the same reason https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/install-gentoo

Thanks, I'll try that next time.

Main reason I use it it's because it has a GUI interface for more or less anything you want to do when configuring the system, Yast, https://www.opensuse-guide.org/yast.php

[elatllat]

You misspelled Gentoo, fixed that for you

A package manager that deals with source only is inefficient and not "easy to use" when compile errors occur.

Cough*OpenSUSE Tumbleweed*Cough

Thanks, I'll try that next time.

[Danielsan]

People that give up at the first issue have already decided what is best (and it is not the thing they are trying right now). You are wasting your time with them.

The big advantage I got with Linux is that I stopped to be a 24H help desk. I don't even convince people to install any Linux distro anymore. I don't waste my time with anyone since a very long time...

[Hi-Angel]

I just downloaded and installed the software just to confirm whether or not what you say is true. The software allows you to open .doc files but only to save in the newer docx format or their own format if you don't want to pay.

Thanks for doing the comparison!

My problem with this FreeOffice bundle is that it has tons of missing features compared to LibreOffice and the paid Softmaker Office.

It's apparently crippled and if I'm reading right, it wont let you save in older Office formats and doesn't even have spell check.

I keep seeing people comment with stuff like this without substance. Maybe people can provide examples (like the comparison page above) instead of vague generalizations.

The LO site has a comparison table, see https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/...te:_LibreOffic e_vs._SoftMaker_Office

Btw, apparently not many peoples tried Softmaker Office, so many rectangles on their side has question marks. So, just in case someone is interested in filling them: that would be great.

I'll give you some facts. The windows binary for FreeDesktop is 114MB and LibreOffice is 282MB. The DEB binaries are 123MB and 168MB respectively. Is that a sign of a more efficient piece of software? Is it a sign of a lack of features? Until someone can point out some lack of features then I'll assume it's just more efficient.

Well, acc. to the comparison table LibeOffice has simply more utilties bundled with it, so yeah, more functional requires more weight.

But disregarding, this is an odd way of comparison. Unless you're running an embedded system, a difference of dozens or even hundreds of MBs for a massive Office suite shouldn't matter.

[starshipeleven]

They're still short on projects that nobody besides them cares about, and then killing them off.

Oh, I know. They could contribute to Wayland!

I care about Wayland, so your statement is invalid