Manjaro 0.8.9 Updates Xfce, KDE, Openbox Editions

[blackout23]

If you use Manjaro unstable repos you could just aswell simply use Antergos.

[Rexilion]

Why should every distro have widespread popularity as it's main goal? That seems idiotic. Arch caters to a specific target group. What's wrong with that?
That's about the same as saying "I wish Lamborghini would make cars every Grandma could enjoy." It simply would not be a Lamborghini anymore.

I'm not stating that Arch should be the next Ubuntu. Just some attitude change will be better for a lot of us. They have many manuals on the wiki which are far more recent than the ones on say Ubuntu or Gentoo's wiki.

Arch is incredibly difficult to install, relatively recently it was made even harder. There used to be a semi-automated thing that did it with menus. Now, you're dumped at a command line and expected to get on with it. Only Gentoo and LFS surpass the difficulty level of installing Arch. I think 'Arch is not for everyone' is more realistic than detrimental.

I find the incredibly an overstatement. You are making the same decisions as you would if you were using an Anaconda installer. You just have to use a CLI to instruct it to make things work. Some examples:

- partition disks: manually with fdisk and mkfs.*
- select timezone: copy the right file to a new location
- pacstrap: install base system
- select locale: edit /etc/locale.gen
- create new uses: useradd

If you use Linux, you will get used to the terminal. And once you are, installing Arch is not that hard. It's just as easy as installing Gentoo IMHO. You have to make the same decisions and it's expected you use CLI tools for that. The manuals are excellent.

I think it's great that Arch developers are not wasting their time building an installer. Yes, this could be considered an elitist attitude. But why hide the true nature of Linux with an installer GUI if you eventually are forced to use terminal for other issue's?

Furthermore, I had quite some disasters with installers like Anaconda and such.

[brosis]

It's not that hard to install, the beginners guide takes you step by step through the process, explaining what each command you run or file you edit does. I started using it just before the Menu installer was removed, and I have to say nothing was really lost, except for some bugs. The 'Arch way' definitely means learning about what you're doing.

Increditably primitive and wrong approach.
The demand for small simple modular overseeable units - is good for producing a set of tools for an engineer. This is known as composable approach.

Now, what engineer actually does (and its his job), is to implement a solution towards the needs of the user. He works as a part of the team that do field questioning, research, proof of concept and then build a solution for the user. This is known as contextual approch. He uses prior mentioned blocks from composable approach to build it.

So if your installer is a set of blocks, that require engineer skill with get-down-to-the-guts way, then it is nothing but an engineer toolbox. Fullstop.
Why is it so? It could be that you lack time, or lack motivation - in either case growth towards user level is not taking place.
If you tell your users of advantage of "flexibility" then its just plain lie.

However, if your installer is user friendly, automated, but allows driving off the road (or not), then it is a user software. Fullstop.

Arch is an engineer toolbox.
With installer gone, its just a sign of them not wishing to work for users, or users hardly ever interested in Arch - only engineers.

Sure, you can write 10-line bash script. Every time. Like an engineer.

[Rexilion]

Increditably primitive and wrong approach.
The demand for small simple modular overseeable units - is good for producing a set of tools for an engineer. This is known as composable approach.

Now, what engineer actually does (and its his job), is to implement a solution towards the needs of the user. He works as a part of the team that do field questioning, research, proof of concept and then build a solution for the user. This is known as contextual approch. He uses prior mentioned blocks from composable approach to build it.

So if your installer is a set of blocks, that require engineer skill with get-down-to-the-guts way, then it is nothing but an engineer toolbox. Fullstop.
Why is it so? It could be that you lack time, or lack motivation - in either case growth towards user level is not taking place.
If you tell your users of advantage of "flexibility" then its just plain lie.

However, if your installer is user friendly, automated, but allows driving off the road (or not), then it is a user software. Fullstop.

Arch is an engineer toolbox.
With installer gone, its just a sign of them not wishing to work for users, or users hardly ever interested in Arch - only engineers.

Sure, you can write 10-line bash script. Every time. Like an engineer.

Yeah, maybe Arch has decided that fdisk, mkfs.* and nano are already part of the contextual approach. The composable approach then would be the POSIX specification that is somewhat implemented in glibc and the standard interfaces of the kernel to name 2.

[zanny]

Arch is an engineer toolbox.
With installer gone, its just a sign of them not wishing to work for users, or users hardly ever interested in Arch - only engineers.

Um, no shit? Arch doesn't want to be the next Ubuntu. The Arch devs make the OS they want, not what they think you want. And they want a live terminal with the standard plethora of sysadmin tools necessary to set up even the most obfuscated and complicated distributed nfs server farm into one system, rather than some GUI installer that gives you a fraction of the setup configuration you can get.

For example, in most distros it is a PITA to set up a btrfs root and have compression on for that initial install, because specifying the initial mount options is often not available - and sometimes, the graphical installers let you specify the boot time fstab options but won't inherit them on the first install mount. You end up with the entire base system being uncompressed until the first upgrade.

That is just one gripe I have that using the "engineers" distro fixes.

And Manjaro (along with Chakra, imo) exist as the non-engineers Arch derivative. and Antergos is for the engineer on a time crunch. Don't try to tell newbies to install Arch, if you want them in that ecosystem put them on a derivative with a nice GUI installer and default package set that behaves like Fedora / Suse / Ubuntu / Mageia.

[blackout23]

Don't get why people think it's wrong to use gdisk and mkfs for formating and partitioning. Guess what, someone wrote these programs exactly for this purpose.

[intellivision]

Don't get why people think it's wrong to use gdisk and mkfs for formating and partitioning. Guess what, someone wrote these programs exactly for this purpose.

Because a GUI shows more information and is easier to interact with than the command line.
Users would rather partition their HDD using a slider rather than trying to figure out how many cylinders it will take.

Antergos doesn't offer any sort of protecting from breakage upstream, Manjaro you can set and forget and the system won't reduce itself to a non-working state.

And for the record, there are more than two Manjaro developers, stop FUDing hard and learn to troll like a man

[maskimummu]

Archbang

I guess I'll just change to another distro which use ArchLinux repos

Archbang uses Arch repos and provides a nicely configured Openbox. You'd need to install a GUI package manager if you want one (see Arch Wiki) - PacmanXG is pretty nice. Installing KDE after that, Openbox can be your fallback if anything goes bad with KDE.

[Etzos]

Increditably primitive and wrong approach.
The demand for small simple modular overseeable units - is good for producing a set of tools for an engineer. This is known as composable approach.

Now, what engineer actually does (and its his job), is to implement a solution towards the needs of the user. He works as a part of the team that do field questioning, research, proof of concept and then build a solution for the user. This is known as contextual approch. He uses prior mentioned blocks from composable approach to build it.

So if your installer is a set of blocks, that require engineer skill with get-down-to-the-guts way, then it is nothing but an engineer toolbox. Fullstop.
Why is it so? It could be that you lack time, or lack motivation - in either case growth towards user level is not taking place.
If you tell your users of advantage of "flexibility" then its just plain lie.

However, if your installer is user friendly, automated, but allows driving off the road (or not), then it is a user software. Fullstop.

Arch is an engineer toolbox.
With installer gone, its just a sign of them not wishing to work for users, or users hardly ever interested in Arch - only engineers.

Sure, you can write 10-line bash script. Every time. Like an engineer.

That you think that you have to be an engineer to use a set of tools (which include instructions!) is kind of funny. It doesn't require an engineer, it requires someone who's willing to learn or already knows how to use the set of tools. The fact that Arch seems "elitist" is a natural extension of The Arch Way. It is by nature minimalistic.
In Arch's case the "user" is assumed to be a competent individual who is willing to learn or already knows how to setup a system (without a GUI). It's just not targeted towards the general public. Complaining that it isn't seems kind of silly. It's like complaining that your car doesn't have the towing capacity of full-sized truck--they're designed for different audiences, if you wanted towing capability you should have gotten a truck. Likewise, if you want GUI's and easy-to-use installers, Arch isn't the right distro. It's just not designed for that.

[Thaodan]

As they try to bring a greater userbase to Arch they should improve the packagekit backend of pacman, its still at 0.7.x.