Which WM for Manjaro? +dual boot advice

uncle_rufus · 13 Aug 2015 at 14:44

Hey all,

Following on a bit from my other thread, I think I'm going to have to bite the bullet and re-install my Linux partition as I can't seem to recover the damage to my Mint 14 install after changing GPU...

Fancying a change and have been looking at Manjaro; seems really nice and I like the idea of it being a rolling-release as Mint ends up falling behind so quickly... But I can't decide which WM to go with; anybody using Manjaro and want to weigh in? Severely tempted by the community i3 version, or maybe Cinammon, or just good old XFCE... Argh!

Also anything I need to be aware of to not mess up my Windows install on the other partition? I was contemplating using Gparted to re-shuffle things a tiny bit; shrinking the Windows partition a little bit to free up some space so I can have 2 other partitions in the future: one for my main working Linux install, and the other to use as a test-bed for other distros etc. (yes, I know I could use VMs for this but sometimes it's just not quite the same and I'm trying to develop my Linux skills etc. so it's nice to be doing a proper install - I just don't want it to always be overwriting and messing up the stable install I actually use!)

I'll probably do a Clonezilla image of the drive first just in case but although I'd prefer not having to mess about with restoring from it by just having it go right in the first place! Is it safe to shrink the Windows partition? Anything else to be careful of?

Rainmaker · 13 Aug 2015 at 15:04

Their Cinnamon DE is nice and also light (about 350MB on boot for me). Be aware that Manjaro, while excellent for non-free drivers and kernel selection tools etc, is slow on security updates. They are built on Arch (as I'm sure you know) but security patches available for Arch users can take a month or more to hit Manjaro's repo because they 'test' them first.

uncle_rufus · 13 Aug 2015 at 15:10

Rainmaker said:
Their Cinnamon DE is nice and also light (about 350MB on boot for me). Be aware that Manjaro, while excellent for non-free drivers and kernel selection tools etc, is slow on security updates. They are built on Arch (as I'm sure you know) but security patches available for Arch users can take a month or more to hit Manjaro's repo because they 'test' them first.

Is Cinnamon really that light? I had it in Mint and although I did like it quite a lot it felt like it might not be the best performer...

I'm not sure how bothered I am about the security patches - it's still a better situation than ending up stuck on an old version of Mint because I'm too lazy to upgrade it; at least you get the patches eventually without a re-install... Also I though I read somewhere that you can tell Manjaro to stay more up-to-date with Arch? (i.e. they have options for "a few days", "a week" or "a month" behind Arch, and you take the risk on stability etc. if you want to?)

Rainmaker · 13 Aug 2015 at 15:23

The latest Cinnamon 2.6 is a hell of a lot lighter than previous versions, Clem & team squashed an absolute ton of bugs and memory leaks. You can also get it in LMDE2 (Betsy) and Mint 17.2 if you choose. If you're lazy a rolling release might not actually suit, they do break sometimes. Maybe better with an LTS disro like Mint 17.x after all?

BTW yes I'd just shrink the Windows install with GParted or set the installer to 'install alongside Windows', but do take that clone first. Bear in mind you can only have 4 primary partitions (MS boot, Windows, Swap, EFI boot for Linux, root, home... you're already over

).

uncle_rufus · 13 Aug 2015 at 15:47

Rainmaker said:
The latest Cinnamon 2.6 is a hell of a lot lighter than previous versions, Clem & team squashed an absolute ton of bugs and memory leaks. You can also get it in LMDE2 (Betsy) and Mint 17.2 if you choose. If you're lazy a rolling release might not actually suit, they do break sometimes. Maybe better with an LTS disro like Mint 17.x after all?

Good point! Though I could do that alongside Manjaro maybe (and then whichever of the two I end up getting on with worse will become the scratch-partition)

Rainmaker said:
BTW yes I'd just shrink the Windows install with GParted or set the installer to 'install alongside Windows', but do take that clone first. Bear in mind you can only have 4 primary partitions (MS boot, Windows, Swap, EFI boot for Linux, root, home... you're already over ).

I thought 4 was a limitation of MBR? Can't a modern UEFI setup handle as many partitions as you want? I already have Windows, Swap, reFind EFI boot manager, Linux root + home + swap I think... (as it's currently Windows 7 + Mint 14)

Rainmaker · 13 Aug 2015 at 16:10

Ah is your disk formatted with GPT? Sorry yeah you'll be OK then.

uncle_rufus · 13 Aug 2015 at 17:57

Phew!

For a minute there I thought I was stuffed!

lamboman · 14 Aug 2015 at 23:26

After playing around with i3 for the past couple of days at work, I completely understand the hype now. So fast, so easy to use, to the point where right now I'm actually going to have a crack at moving to Linux full time in place of OS X and its bugginess. Mac WMs such as Amethyst don't even come close despite the promises made.

My recommendation for the time being would be to have two WMs installed however, one "normal" and one such as i3, whether tiling or not.

Woden · 14 Aug 2015 at 23:35

Be careful with tiling window managers. They are insanely addictive. I like xmonad myself, and its difficult to go back to anything else.

uncle_rufus · 15 Aug 2015 at 00:42

At work we don't really have the freedom to install whatever we want, so I'm stuck on RHEL with Gnome 2, but I sort of operate it a bit like a (severely limited) tiling window manager by setting up launchers so that my terminals and editors open in specific places to maximise the screen space etc. which is really what interests me about tiling managers... Plus with 3 monitors to work on I feel like the more traditional WMs and workspaces shared across multiple monitors are a bit sucky... (at work I have 2 screens and actually just run 2 separate X instances, which works okay but as you would imagine has its limitations as well)

I'm leaning towards "awesome" at the moment; since I was intending to learn Lua at some point anyway and that's what its configs are written in... but I'll probably give various ones a try over time

Reading up on this has me intrigued about giving Arch a try - it seems to have a bit of a reputation (as do its users :s) but I'm curious whether the supposed "difficulty" in installing and configuring it is really true or not... (I may just try it out in a VM)

Woden · 15 Aug 2015 at 11:39

I can't see it being that hard. I run Gentoo and is the same idea really. Just get used to googling the config files

uncle_rufus · 15 Aug 2015 at 12:32

I guess it's just the principle of having something which is truly, completely a blank slate for you to configure exactly how you want...

Clonezilla is 50% through imaging the disk to my server so will be time to get started shortly... I'm still undecided though!!! Presently thinking I may try Manjaro first, but as discussed above leave space on the disk for another partition to mess about with...

So now the only decision is which window manager to get with Manjaro... the non-community choices seem to be Xfce or KDE or the "net" edition (which has nothing)... I don't really like KDE so it's between Xfce or "net"