What is Manjaro and why use it?
Manjaro is a distribution of Arch Linux. It brings a much more user friendly experience to the Arch world and provides many conveniences that used to be manual like installing appropriate graphics drivers, supplying a graphical application installer, and more.
What is dual booting?
Dual booting is the concept of installing two separate Operating Systems (OS) on the same computer. Generally, one of the two OS will supply a boot menu that gives you the choice to pick between which OS to boot into when you hit the power button. While you cannot run both OS simultaneously, this way allows you to setup what you want in Linux and maybe allow you to continue having a Windows installation for the handful of applications you cannot use in Linux.
There has been a lot of back and forth in my life of whether or not to switch fully over to Linux. The unfortunate part is, I cannot. There are still applications and drivers that are not fully supported and likely will never be. However, that news does not make it a hard “no”.
Creating a bootable USB
The first step was to boot onto a thumbdrive with the Manjaro ISO. There are many mediums to install an ISO image onto but USB drives are my preference. Manjaro has some documentation on all these types but you can follow this guide to use Rufus on Windows.
I normally use Balena Etcher to create my bootable OS drives.
First download Manjaro from their official downloads. Before you close their downloads page, select the “More” option and download the Checksum for your choice distribution.
I chose KDE Plasma for my desktop experience and then downloaded the checksum.
Then we can verify the ISO image by running a command.
If you are on Windows, open Powershell and navigate to your downloads directory, usually cd ~\Downloads will get you there. Then you can perform Get-FileHash followed by the filename of the ISO we just downloaded. This will print out a SHA-256 hash, a mathematical representation of the data in the file, and you can compare that value with the one from within the checksum file we downloaded before.
If you are on Mac or another Linux OS, again open terminal and navigate to the downloads directory. Instead of Get-FileHash you can run sha256sum in the same way and compare the hash.
From there, launch Etcher, select the ISO we downloaded and your thumbdrive, then flash it.
We can plug the thumbdrive into our system and reboot. While rebooting, mash the Delete key to go to your BIOS. In BIOS there should be an option to force boot to your thumbdrive.
Installing Manjaro
As compared to older editions of Linux, especially Arch which Manjaro is layered on top of, the new install process is quite painless.
In my case, there was a popup on boot that asked me if I would like to install and I clicked the “Launch Installer” option, selected my region, time, and keyboard settings. Then I got hit with a slightly confusing page.
You see, I want to dual boot and that is a common use case. Most people, however, install Windows to take up their entire drive and when they go to dual boot need to shrink that partition. That is not my case. I have Windows preinstalled to a partition of my primary NVMe drive. The other space of my drive is known as unallocated space, a region unused by anything on my computer at this time and does not show up as a drive in the Windows File Explorer.
When presented with the partition selection page, I thought “Oh, I will pick Install Alongside because I have Windows installed already.” Oh how wrong I was. That option forces you to pick an existing Windows partition to shrink in order to fit the install in the same amount of space already used by your drive. Then your other options are Replace a partition, Erase disk, and Manual partitioning.
I started doing some research on how to properly manually partition for Arch and Manjaro Linux distributions but was irked that there is not an Install me in the empty space on the drive like a genius button. Well, turns out I was wrong. The Replace a partition option gives you to ability to select unallocated space as your partition to install on.
After getting through those silly qualms, I proceeded to fill out my name, login info, computer name, whether or not I want to auto-login on boot or require a password.
Finally, you are presented with a summary of options selected including where to install and you can click confirm to proceed! Once the install completes, you will be given the option to restart your PC, you might as well at this point.
Post Install
From here on out, you should be greeted by a Manjaro flavored boot options menu which still gives you access to your Windows installation at boot.
I always go for updates as soon as I install a new OS. It seems like the best course of action to ensure everything is working properly and has no major security issues. On Manjaro, there is a little red shield icon in the tray (bottom right) that will let you know if you are out of date. Once you click that and install the updates, it should go to white with a check mark.
Of course I have a variety of uses for my primary computer at home and that means installing a swath of new packages.
- Development
- VS Code
- NodeJS
- Golang
- Python
- 3D Design / Printing
- Prusa Slicer
- FreeCAD
- Gaming
- Steam
- Discord
- Elden Ring - One of my all time favorites
- Currently playing through Bioshock - it plays great on Linux!
- Streaming / Video Editing
- Open Broadcaster Software (OBS)
- Some video editor
- Music
- Just kidding, I own Cubase on Windows and will probably stick to that for now
If I were configuring Windows, at this point I would also mention installing Borderless Gaming which allows you to set custom sizes for applications and convert them to borderless mode without forcing fullscreen. It also allows you specify a location for the application and set it to automatically go there whenever you launch it. Luckily this is not Windows and that feature is natively built into Linux via Alt+F3.
Lastly, I need to mess with some configurations like my mouse sensitivity and display refresh rate. But besides that, the process is done and I am ready to start daily driving my Manjaro based desktop. I hope to write more about my experiences and difficulties in the future and discuss what can be done to work around those difficulties or when it might be time to quit trying.
Finale
Well if you made it this far, then surely you are in it for the whole thing. This project of switching my life over to Linux has been fun to start, but not without its troubles. In fact, the troubles are quite horrible for me with my current build on Manjaro.
Whether it is my hardware or something about Manjaro, there are a few notable issues that are preventing my switch to an alternative Linux distribution for a daily driver. Yes, they are so bad for me and I need to have a better suited operating system for my needs.
The first issue is that OpenRGB does not work. When you come home and boot up your epic gaming PC with custom RGB, you want to see it shine. I have a favorite color for my desktop to be, cyan. For whatever reason, it just looks the best with my black case and hardwood desk. I switched to OpenRGB some years ago after getting frustrated with all of the nonsense RGB bloatware out there. It is a great tool and has some community support on Arch, but not enough. The port does not run on my Manjaro install. Even worse, it disconnects my display whenever I open the application. I tested this on Ubuntu and had the same issue, so it is not exclusive to Manjaro, however it does not happen on Windows.
That issue alone was not enough to disuade me though. The second issue is sleep. It is a simple yet critical function in my day-to-day living. No, shutting down and restarting is not an ideal choice. Remember that this is my daily driver device and I have a pretty solid workflow on Windows. I am trying to replace Windows with Linux and while there may be some issues to work through, there are some things that I expect to work out of the box and it is a really bad sign to me when they do not. Much like the OpenRGB issue, when I wake my computer from sleep I get no display. I tried unplugging, replugging, switching ports on my GPU, and updating drivers to no avail.
All in all, the experience was great and I will revisit Manjaro soon. The OS is almost there for me and if it were not for my tight time schedule on projects right now, I would tinker more with it. If you want to use Manjaro for gaming and some other common use cases, I think it is a great OS to use and you have a lot of forums to search when you run into issues.