I’m starting to get ads in my Windows notifications so it’s time I move.
I got Manjaro KDE Endeavor OS with KDE installed and got my most played non-steam games running through steam proton which is awesome.
But I have a few big issues.
-
My network randomly drops. A restart fixes but I can’t even download Cyberpunk with my 1GB connection before it crashes. Klogs showed something about the network manager successfully shutting down but I can’t find much else.
-
No Radeon software. I sometimes need to record clips/ stream so relive is nice but the biggest problem is my second 1080p monitor I Super Resolution to fit more programs on it. I can’t find a way to replicate that functionality. I also do not know how to control Radeon anti-lag, chill, Smart Memory Access, etc.
-
HDR controls. Nothing in the display settings so I’m lost
-
Alternative Software I haven’t spent a lot of time looking but things like wallpaper engine, rainmeter, powertoys.
If anyone ran into the same things and has solutions it’d make my day.
EDIT:
With the overwhelming note from everyone here I distro-hopped to Endeavor OS with KDE (I liked that it let me install multiple DE’s) biggest loss is the App store but I was already using winget/choco on Windows so having to do pacman -S is pretty much the same. EDIT: Added KDEs Discover and its backend, seems to be alright.
installing plasma-wayland-session and switching to Wayland let me set display scale below 100% removing the biggest need for Radeon Software.
Network thing I’m still digging into but it persisted from the distro hop and I think is Steam-related because if I don’t launch steam it just doesn’t happen
EDIT2:
netmon logs - https://pastebin.com/wKZrV04Y demsg - https://pastebin.com/3rAPcAve
You’ve probably figured this out by now but KDE has all the theming and rainmeter style widgets available. I just installed most of my desktop aesthetics direct from the System Settings on KDE, it’s mostly Catppuccin Mocha. Had to search for the Github for it to find some cool basic wallpapers that matched the theme perfectly.
Steam has some weird issues and I had it set to launch in terminal so the progress and errors get posted in there. Then I could search the web with the error codes. I don’t know the command though.
For games try ProtonDB.com, and then sort by “Tweaks” or whatever to see what people did to make the game run correctly.
- For wallpaper engine you could check out wallpaper engine for kde. That will allow you to select wallpapers directly from your wallpaper engine library.
If you have any additional software which you are looking for FOSS Linux alternatives for, feel free to list them. Your options are much greater than most people coming from Windows expect them to be, and many of us have already spent a lot of time deep down the rabbit hole of finding quality open-source software alternatives, so we can surely point you in the right directions.
For all those people saying to not use Manjaro if you want an alternative that just works try Mint or Fedora. Arch is great but requires a lot more work that you might not be interested in.
Arch and manjaro are almost the same… But manjaro is less work, like you said
Manjaro should literally never be used, it’s a terrible, terrible distro that just makes arch worse and provides little to no benefit.
If you don’t want to use a TUI or touch a terminal, try endeavoros.
I went from arch to manjaro because time is money/my life and I didn’t have time to fuck around last install. I’ll echo that manjaro has been great. I game on it, I edit video in DaVinci resolve on it, I browse on it. It’s awesome.
If you don’t want to use a TUI or touch a terminal, try endeavoros.
Why are you recommending a terminal centric distro for someone who doesn’t want to touch the terminal. Endeavour does not even ship with discover+packagekit so he has to most things with the terminal
Manjaro is fine for people that don’t want to deal with CLI-ness of Arch. I have it installed on my parents computer.
No it is not, the simple fact that it updates the kernel with different version numbers means eventually you’ll have to manually intervene to update the kernel, this has happened MANY times to the elderly people I used to give it. And that’s just one of many things that manjaro has fucked up.
Just use endeavoros for that usecase. There is never a good reason to use manjaro.
I haven’t had an issue like that in the three years they’ve been using it. They don’t do the updates, I do when I see them every month or two.
I’ve had way more issues with Arch and ZFS (even when using the DKMS package) than I ever had with Manjaro.
It breaks if you install AUR packages because they keep their main repository behind Arch. It’s an awful distribution. They add a nice looking custom desktop but otherwise add no value. They are a bunch of amateur clowns too. There’s no good reason to use it over Endeavour if one is looking for an easier Arch.
