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2013-04-13

No fun: OpenSuse and Manjaro

OpenSuse

It's my third attempt with OpenSuse - and the first time it actually installed. Pity it's the only successful aspect of this experience. It went like that:
I made USB-install-image of their DVD with Suses' provided Imagewriter. USB booted nicely. Only strange and also dangerous point in this installation is that you do not have clear bootloader conf option. It appears only in the end summary, mixed in with other text. If you miss it, your sda-s MBR will be over-written. Doh!
By the way, I picked Xfce as DE. Install took loooong time. Then it booted - with 10s automatic reboot counter... very silly that. Say, you are making a sandwich, or fifty if we take install-time to account, and find that your auto-rebooted machine is nowhere you wanted it to be. We-know-better and Windowish way, no?
And 'Windowish' fits with following. When I got back to Suse-boot, I had to insert USB again (never met such thing during my installs of some 15 distros. I mean - that was new for me). Installation continued a looong time and then suddenly, one meter-bar filled only 15%, it landed on desktop.
Xfce desktop was rather bland and untuned. Menu wasn't to my liking... anyway, after some look-around I booted - to fix first-time-no-network-bug.
So, let's summarize: Loooong+loooong installation and 2 boots... Windows XP class, I would say. Shittier than Win7 for sure. And without saying, longest ever Linux install for me.
Fortunately I didn't have to infuriate myself any longer - OpenSuse 12.3 Xfce didn't boot further than to 'doing fast boot' and hung after that. I even appreciate such a supple humor.

Manjaro

The day before Suse-disaster I installed Manjaro 64bit Openbox. Not wanting to muse here over all reasons why, I mention only: something different and difficult, but with little help for me-arch-stupid.
Of course I read before, shivered, read more - especially about some helpful features of Manjaro and, well, thought that it could be fun and games.

Install (also USB+Imagewriter): As expected, the installer looked like badly designed Norton Commander from 1990. 'Cause I didn't print tutorial out, I went back and forth couple of times - but install was, even more surprisingly, success. Despite strange error-message from grub ...
I booted and updated my master-bootloader, then booted back to Manjaro. Ah, yes, by the way, not install nor boot were 'loooong'. Of the contrary, they were sharpish. And what's most amazing - installer did install Nvidia driver (you have to click 'I want')! ... But my chosen time acquired 4 hours plus when it reached after-install desktop...

Tint2 ribbon is on top, and that's it for desktop items. Nice and clean. But even nicer is Tint2 at bottom, which I quickly made to happen.
After that it was mostly pain and punishment for my sin of touching Arch:

- Trying to update: Pamac (Pacman GUI, Manjaro special) opened up but didn't react very much to anything ... So I closed it and amused myself with other things. When I tried again, it didn't start at all and gave an error 'another instance is running'. One pamac process was running - I killed it in Taskmanager. No difference. 'sudo killall pamac' in terminal - can't, doesn't exist... I did logout/login... I couldn't find any obvious way to get past that error. So, I had to do every install/uninstall in terminal and pacman-style. 'Yes, it's that simple', as Manjaros' help-pdf says about pamac-manager.
- Main menu (or absence of it) really IS perverted. I read before of it - but I couldn't even imagine something so far-gone.
There is desktop right-click menu from OB-s menu.xml but it's totally castrated, no menu topics and almost no apps. But, for example, there is not-working-Pamac, twice, and help-pdf - as the first most important shortcut, and maybe some 5 other items (including Configuration-folder with some irrelevant and strangely listed items).
Then there is (icon on panel) this... err... Unity-inspired search-thingy which is supposed (?) to replace menu. I say only 'what??'.
From crippled desktop-menu you can at least open Appfinder, which seems to be only place to have normalish appmenu. When you click on some app, then after that Appfinder closes itself. So it's like: click on desktop, click on Appfinder, click on menu, maybe drag a slider, double-click on app... and then you do it again.
Default browser is crash-prone crappy Midori. Fortunately, installing FF is not a problem.

Then I spent some two hours rescuing the menu... and during this therapy reached conclusion that I had simply picked a wrong toy. I had thought that Manjaro is Arch made for lazys (those who doesn't want to start from terminal, but from minimal DE). But that's not the case. It's more like when you have a brute off-road jeep and you tape sofa, tv, bar, slick tires and Bentleys' batch onto and into it, and wrong way around too. The result doesn't work very much, looks mighty odd, doesn't fit for anything, and makes one think that Devs have some kind of existential problems. Sorry. Format.
... Though, I might try Archbang sometime. I have heard that their installer still overwrites MBRs, and that's only option, or should I say - no option. If this changes...

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

You have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. :D