There are many flavors of Linux, we call them distributions but in a way, I think “flavor” is a good word for it as some some are a sweet and delightful experience while with others a lingering, foul taste remains. Manjaro has not left a foul taste in any way. In full disclosure, I am not a fan of Arch based Linux distributions. I appreciate the idea of this one-step-removed Gentoo and for those that really like to get into the nitty-gritty bits Arch is good for that. My problem with Arch is the lack of quality assurance. The official repository on Arch Wiki describes the process of how core packages need to be signed off by developers before they are allowed to move from staging into the official repositories. With the rate at which packages come in, it is almost an impossibility that through manual testing software will continue to work well with other software as some dependencies may change. Admittedly, I don’t use it daily, outside of VMs for testing nor do I have a lot of software installed so this is not going to be a problem I am likely to experience.

Manjaro, from my less than professional opinion, is a slightly slower rolling Arch that seems to do more testing and the process, from what I understand, is similar. Developers have to approve the packages before they are moved into the official repositories. I also understand that there isn’t any automated QA to perform any testing so this is all reliant on user or community testing, which, seemingly, Manjaro is doing a good job of it.

My dance with Manjaro is as part of a BigDaddyLinuxLive Community challenge, to give it a fair shake and share your experience.

This is my review of Manjaro with the Plasma Desktop. Bottom Line Up Front, this is quite possibly the safest and most stable route if you like the Arch model. In the time I ran it, I didn’t have any issues with it. The default Plasma Desktop is quite nice, and the default themes are also top notch. The graphical package manager works fantastically well and you do have Snap support right out of the gate. It’s truly a great experience. Was it good enough to push me from my precious openSUSE? No, but it has made for a contender and something about which to think.

For those not following on Twitter, recently I picked up one of the new Dell XPS 7390 laptops for finally being able to deliver Linux benchmarks from Intel Ice Lake! Yes, it's real and running under Linux! For those eyeing the Dell XPS 7390 with this being the first prominent laptop with Ice Lake, here is a brief look at the initial experience with using Ubuntu 19.10.

The Dell XPS 7390 laptop that's being used for testing features the Intel Core i7 1065G7 processor, an Icelake quad-core processor with 1.3GHz base frequency and 3.9GHz peak turbo frequency. This Ice Lake processor features Gen11 Iris Plus Graphics, which we are eagerly testing with the latest Linux graphics drivers.

This distro needs only limited system resources. Requirements include an Intel-compatible Pentium 2 processor or later and at least 512 MB of RAM. You can stretch this minimal memory level by running the "boot:nocache" option if the computer has less than 512 MB RAM.

No hard drive is needed, but you can find in the system menu an installation tool to place Austrumi Linux on the hard drive or a bootable USB drive. You also can run a live session directly from a bootable DVD if your system has an optical drive.

Other than the lack of adequate English language support within this distro, the only other significant design weakness is the lack of persistent memory if you run the OS without a hard drive installation. This means you can not save personal data and system configurations for your applications.

You can use a USB drive or cloud storage to save personal data. If you use Austrumi Linux as a portable OS, those two storage solutions will be in play anyway.

Austrumi is clearly not targeting non-European users. If developers fixed the language support for non-Latvian speakers, it could be much more convenient to use. Expanding support for other global regions is a critical need for this otherwise very handy performer.

Kdux boots to a console environment where we can once against sign in as the root user without a password. (Passwords can be set once we login.) The default installation is fairly minimal. The operating system uses just 2.5GB of space and consumes 35MB of memory. The GNU command line tools and manual pages are installed. The systemd init software and an up to date Linux kernel are installed. There is no compiler or development tools.

By default there is no network connection enabled. We can run the dhcpcd command to get a dynamic, wired address. Otherwise we need to manually set up networking. Once we get on-line, the Pacman package manager can be used to install and upgrade packages. Pacman connects to the Arch Linux repositories.

At this point, as far as I could tell, there is virtually no difference between running Arch Linux with the zsh shell and running Kdux. We have the same base packages, the same repositories, the same Arch documentation seems to be relevant. We are given the bare minimum building blocks for a distribution and left to build whatever operating system we want from the pieces.

Hardware support, out of the box is limited. Kdux was unable to detect my laptop's wireless card, preventing me from getting on-line. The distribution ran smoothly in a VirtualBox instance, but was unable to use more than a 800x600 resolution.

I'm not sure I see many benefits to using Kdux instead of plain Arch. The install process is less flexible and at least as cryptic, but once it is up and running, Kdux and Arch appear to be virtually identical. The one perk to using Kdux seems to be the Desktop edition which allows us to test our hardware prior to installing. However, this benefit is somewhat balanced by the apparent lack of installer on the Desktop edition, meaning I had to download the Desktop edition to test Kdux on my hardware and then use the Standard edition to install the distribution. I could have set up Arch in a similar amount of time with one download and without wiping out the contents of my hard drive.