Manjaro Linux 18.0

Mayank Sharma tests a user-friendly Arch-based distro, ignoring the jibes of being called a pseudo Arch user by one very vocal advocate.

- Mayank Sharma

Manjaro has occupied the top spot on the distrowatch.com’s page hit rankings for quite some time now. It might not be an accurate reflection of the project’s popularity, but at least shows a steady interest in the distribution.

Manjaro is everything its progenitor isn’t. It’s designed to be user-friendly and aims to provide a complete working installation right out of the box, both characteristics that are antithesis of Arch. While Arch is popular as a do-it-yourself distribution that enables power users to construct their installation from the ground up, Manjaro ships with a user-friendly graphical installer to enable everyone – irrespective of their skill level – to get a taste of Arch’s awesomeness as an everyday desktop.

Manjaro is available in three officially supported flavours, with the Xfce edition being the flagship offering. The latest release sports a new theme named Adapta- Maia along with some other minor visual changes across the system to enhance the user experience. All editions use a customised Calamares installer, which in addition to the cosmetic differences, also enables you to encrypt the partition in which you plan to install the distribution.

Advanced users will appreciate Manjaro-Architect, which is a command line installer that’s designed to help users install a completely custom build with their choice of components including the kernel, init system, desktop environment and more, and will fetch the latest versions of all packages from the repositories. Besides the three official editions, the project also hosts a slew of community-supported editions based around different desktop environments including Budge, Cinnamon, Deepin, Mate, LXDE and more.