Any other Linux users here? And has anyone fully migrated?

[SpikeSlania]

Same here, except I push manjaro for beginners :P I'm not a fan of unbuntu or mint period, but I guess others have had more luck than me with those >_>

Manjaro is on my list of never recommend Distros. Putting to the side any of it's features or set up, the reason why I would never recommend it is that it collects all User Data. It has an Opt Out option but how many people are going to know about it going in and will have already collected any data of your system before you hit the Opt Out button. If I were to recommend an Arch based distro to a beginner it would be CachyOS

 

[_oBSOLEte_]

Don't worry, I been suggesting Fedora over Ubuntu this whole time :p Which the major change we're about to do is remove X11 packages from the repo soon. Full on Wayland ahead

Mmm. Still not able to run all I want to run on my side with Wayland here.

OBS and remote desktop apps like RustDesk are breaking on it.

 

[Deleted member 590394]

Fully an Arch Linux user, and I've been rocking it for the better part of 8 years.

 

[popckorn]

This goes here lel

 

[diapered]

Putting to the side any of it's features or set up

Well, that is a lot to put aside >_> A preinstalled simple and easy to use software center that handles updates and maintenance makes it perfect for newbies imo... I think it is great to start one's linux journey with manjaro: it works and you only need to use cl if you want to.

it is that it collects all User Data. It has an Opt Out option but how many people are going to know about it going in and will have already collected any data of your system before you hit the Opt Out button.

I had to google that, are you referring to mdd? For one, it seems not preinstalled (yet?) I was not aware of this and yea that makes me sad that apparently it will have already collected that system info before you can even opt out, so it is not much of a choice >_< Why are the manjaro team such goobers >_<

I did see what is collected from a user posting the output that installed mdd, and unless someone has physical access to your machine, it is not possible for that data to fingerprint for you, as far as I understand? So unless you elaborate, I think the way you worded that is a little unfair to the manjaro team: they are transparent on what they are collecting with this program (that I don't think is even preinstalled at this point?)

I don't use manjaro anymore, but they must have a reason for this I want to believe the data is innocuous and this is only for more leverage with their hardware vendors or improvements they need to expand the accessibility of linux

 

[SpikeSlania]

Well, that is a lot to put aside >_> A preinstalled simple and easy to use software center that handles updates and maintenance makes it perfect for newbies imo... I think it is great to start one's linux journey with manjaro: it works and you only need to use cl if you want to.

Personal experience with Manjaro has been watching Linus use it in his 30 Days of Linux challenge and every Linux YouTubers I watch saying to avoid it. So I never personally used but then the MDD is another black mark that means I will never use it. It is in development and will collect system and hardware data. As many people pointed out the issue is that you will automatically opt in until you opt out and not the other way around. Like when the steam survey hits me with a pop up I say yes and send system info to them, but with them going the route you don't even get a say at first is a dark mark.

 

[QuestForTori]

I may use a Mac as my daily driver these days (Still has the apps that my job mandates, but still has access to Unix utilities), but I daily drove Linux all the way back in high school with a silly little distro called Ubuntu Ultimate Edition. I loved it, but I eventually had to switch back when I got to college since I needed to run certain apps that didn't want to support Linux. Still though, I've kept a Linux machine around for tinkering or server use in some fashion ever since then!

 

[MegaDrive1987]

I have jumped around a few distros. First started with a Raspberry Pi built by my grandpa. At first, I didn't like it. Then, as I was stuck with it, I started to get games on it (Mainly DOOM, and a few others) and I started to get used to it. After experimenting from time to time, I decided to grab a 1TB SSD and install Arch on my own gaming laptop. Ever since, I was distro hopping both out of curiosity and to see what I like. Right now, I am using Linux Mint, and honestly, I think I am stuck on it. It's great and it makes a lot of issues I had on Arch and Fedora rather minimal. Also, it's based on Ubuntu, which is what I am mainly used to because, you know, Debian/PiOS being my first. I am loving it.

Of course, I do have Windows installed on my main machine for more demanding games and FL Studio, but ever since I tried Mint, I have rarely used it.

One thing that I LOVE about Mint is it reminds me of classic Windows. When we had Windows XP on our family computer (Had ME when we got it) I used to use the classic Windows theme anyway as I found it was snappier than the default new XP skin.

 

[SpikeSlania]

Fully an Arch Linux user, and I've been rocking it for the better part of 8 years.

There is some doubt in my mind since I did hear the Arch catch phrase :P

One thing that I LOVE about Mint is it reminds me of classic Windows. When we had Windows XP on our family computer (Had ME when we got it) I used to use the classic Windows theme anyway as I found it was snappier than the default new XP skin.

I do have a certain nostalgic love for some older windows desktops that does have me eying Cinnamon, LXQt, and LXDE desktop environments. But I will probably just end up sticking to GNOME/Cosmic

 

[diapered]

Personal experience with Manjaro has been watching Linus use it in his 30 Days of Linux challenge and every Linux YouTubers I watch saying to avoid it. So I never personally used but then the MDD is another black mark that means I will never use it. It is in development and will collect system and hardware data. As many people pointed out the issue is that you will automatically opt in until you opt out and not the other way around. Like when the steam survey hits me with a pop up I say yes and send system info to them, but with them going the route you don't even get a say at first is a dark mark.

Don't trust youtubers. lol for example, I saw many say you need to burn dc games at low speed until @popckorn set me straight itt. And when googling this, I see a lot of bad advice. For example, I do not think access to AUR is a positive for manjaro: you should not use AUR if you are on manjaro, unless your really know what you are doing. The curation the manjaro team does (delaying packages) can cause conflicts.

Sorry to be the rtg manjaro apologist , I know many have negative feelings about manjaro, but it was the first linux distro I experienced that gave me zero issues, so that is why I recommend it to newbies. But yea, mdd concerns me, but when I googled it, I don't think it is preinstalled with current manjaro versions. I think they are still testing it out? Can anyone confirm?

I now use garuda and I saw on the forums there is development to make the garuda assistant include software management. If garuda develops their own software center for their distro like manjaro has pamac, I think that will give manjaro a run for its money as a newbie friendly distro.

 

[SpikeSlania]

Sorry to be the rtg manjaro apologist , I know many have negative feelings about manjaro, but it was the first linux distro I experienced that gave me zero issues, so that is why I recommend it to newbies. But yea, mdd concerns me, but when I googled it, I don't think it is preinstalled with current manjaro versions. I think they are still testing it out? Can anyone confirm?

It's fine to have your own personal bias and likes, I openly state my bias towards Fedora even though people don't like them due to IBM being involved :p But seems like Manjaro news exploded all at once in November and then died off with nothing new being added. Just finished watching Brodie's summary video on it and seems like the last update he heard in his now 6 months old video was about the developers finally reluctantly taking a legal look at what they're doing. Manjaro is head quartered in the EU and it looks like what they want to do goes against privacy laws in the EU. I'm sure if Manjaro finally releases their MDD the news will explode in the FOSS world.

 

[Deleted member 590394]

There is some doubt in my mind since I did hear the Arch catch phrase :P

*L* Arch, by the way

 

[Leon]

There is some doubt in my mind since I did hear the Arch catch phrase :P

I do have a certain nostalgic love for some older windows desktops that does have me eying Cinnamon, LXQt, and LXDE desktop environments. But I will probably just end up sticking to GNOME/Cosmic

Gnome is a safe option, but i avoid it like the plague, it's too political, kde for me on my strong systems, probably XFCE or cinnamon on weaker ones.

 

[SpikeSlania]

But yea, mdd concerns me, but when I googled it, I don't think it is preinstalled with current manjaro versions. I think they are still testing it out? Can anyone confirm?

Well, I did some digging and I highly recommend never go digging on the Manjaro forums with the mess they are in. But I found somewhat of an answer to your question.

They had a poll about Opt In vs Opt Out and as accepted an overwhelming majority voted for Opt In. So sounds like it's going to be Opt In now but we won't know for sure until sometime this year maybe whenever Romangg gets around to it. I wouldn't be surprised if he just sticks to Opt Out after that huge mess on their forums and how much he is against Opt In.

 

[diapered]

Whether rust works or not, a full rust changeover is not something your gonna get alot of help on with the linux community, at least not immediately, so ubuntu's gonna have some teething issues at best, especially since rust is unfinished.

Well, rust is just another low level language like C, so it WILL "work". As indifferent as I am with ubuntu, they aren't going to ship something completely broken, and it seems like their rewrite of coreutils in rust is going well. I'm more curious about the reason/motivation to change the license to MIT from GPL as a result of this endeavor...

Again, it might be silly for me to judge based on video games, but Play! (the ps2 emulator under MIT license) runs like shit, imo So my expectations are not great...

 

[popckorn]

 

[diapered]

I highly recommend never go digging on the Manjaro forums with the mess they are in

lol, I thought the same while I was scrolling through on this, I couldn't take it anymore and gave up You must have more patience than me @SpikeSlania Why don't they pin responses from the team to the top? Maybe I was in wrong forum section?

Well, anyway, I like how they responded to the concerns. And yea, I didn't think it was implemented because it seemed hard to find a solid answer by googling: if it was a preinstalled program, I would imagine it would be easy to get a straight answer instead of forum digging. It sounded like alarmist youtube commentary for clicks from the start, to me...

So yea, unless there is another manjaro program or script they run in the background that I am not aware of, I think it is a little unfair to say "they collect user data", as that implies something nefarious; I'm sure whatever data they collect, if any, is no different than other popular distros (crash reports etc.). The USER needs to install mdd themselves and volunteer that data.

Like I said, I recognize the manjaro team has made mistakes (why I affectionately refer to them as "goobers" ), but I still have a soft spot for them, even though I don't use manjaro anymore, I believe they are trying their best to make the best newbie friendly linux distro. All hardware I have installed majaro on functioned great: retroarch worked and no wifi issues etc. Is it perfect? no, the software is limited (I never used AUR on manjaro), and I don't understand how holding back packages helps with stability, but whatever they do seems to work and makes a great easy to use distro for a novice, imo.

 

[_oBSOLEte_]

I've been dual booting for a long ass time. I also still use older systems and emulators, use DOS regularly since I love my DOS games, sometimes older mac versions, as well as various older systems like C64. So I don't see a reason why I should migrate to only one system unless Windows in the future truly becomes garbage server side only.

Same here. All the eggs, all the baskets, using Grub since 20 years. I think people are just afraid of properly partitioning their drive for multiple OSes, so they'll rather act as zealots for one OS/distro or the other, when in the end, they're basically all just the same.

 

[diapered]

I think people are just afraid of properly partitioning their drive for multiple OSes

 

[Zerpina]

I have used various Linux distros over the years, and Mint is my pick for daily use. Of the six PCs I have, only one runs Windows, and that's solely because my Job uses a proprietary program that is Windows only. So, I'm stuck with that, but I digress. I use Linux for everything except work, and I’m willing to put up with a new learning curve if I switch to a different distro. I love Linux.

 

[Leon]

Same here. All the eggs, all the baskets, using Grub since 20 years. I think people are just afraid of properly partitioning their drive for multiple OSes, so they'll rather act as zealots for one OS/distro or the other, when in the end, they're basically all just the same.

And tbh, they should.

When i decided to finally ditch windows once and for all, i ended up killing the bootloader for my linux os because windows bootloader had wormed it's way in and made all of my os's inoperable,

Thankfully i had backed up all of my data so it didn't take long to get back to normal, but that's the main reason i hate dual booting and partitions, windows can easily fry your linux os because of how it works, even linux's GRUB can break from it.
Tbh i just prefer to not have attached bootloaders, i guess one day i'll reinstall windows just in case there's 1 game that doesn't work on linux but i'm sure as hell making sure that the bootloader is separate.

 

[diapered]

And tbh, they should.

When i decided to finally ditch windows once and for all, i ended up killing the bootloader for my linux os because windows bootloader had wormed it's way in and made all of my os's inoperable,

Thankfully i had backed up all of my data so it didn't take long to get back to normal, but that's the main reason i hate dual booting and partitions, windows can easily fry your linux os because of how it works, even linux's GRUB can break from it.
Tbh i just prefer to not have attached bootloaders, i guess one day i'll reinstall windows just in case there's 1 game that doesn't work on linux but i'm sure as hell making sure that the bootloader is separate.

Thank you! I didn't want to comment on dual booting because it has been over a decade since I did and I didn't run into issues, but I see all these forum posts that dual booting can cause exactly the issues you described. I'm sure there is a way to safely do it with careful partitioning like @_oBSOLEte_ mentioned, but it seems like lots of work, and no way I have the patience for that... I would constantly be paranoid that a windows update could fuck with the booting or other firmware. Now I just nuke every drive of windows Just to be safe...

 

[_oBSOLEte_]

And tbh, they should.

When i decided to finally ditch windows once and for all, i ended up killing the bootloader for my linux os because windows bootloader had wormed it's way in and made all of my os's inoperable,

Thankfully i had backed up all of my data so it didn't take long to get back to normal, but that's the main reason i hate dual booting and partitions, windows can easily fry your linux os because of how it works, even linux's GRUB can break from it.
Tbh i just prefer to not have attached bootloaders, i guess one day i'll reinstall windows just in case there's 1 game that doesn't work on linux but i'm sure as hell making sure that the bootloader is separate.

Parted is the very basics. I wouldn't even install Windows and only Windows without a grub rescue disc and properly formatting my drive with partitions adapted to the planned use of the box. That's something people should figure out *before* planning to install anything, so they don't get stuck after the fact, afraid to resize something and unable to find 4 GB to test another distro on their 2TB drives. XD

And Grub and SystemD-boot can break themselves, just like everything they don't need that damn Windows automatic startup repair for that. That's why people keep their data backed up and a few bootable dongles to rescue their stuff. I never had an OS completely fried by dualbooting.

Have you guys ever build a new PC from scratch, and got something not properly working that you had to troubleshoot? What do you write for the sendback after testing the piece? That it didn't work on Arch/Ubuntu/Fedora or whatever distro flavor you fashion? Here if you cant prove it wasn't properly working on the OS that's written on the box, you can kiss your refund goodbye. And usually that OS is win10. Sad but true.

 

[SpikeSlania]

It sounded like alarmist youtube commentary for clicks from the start, to me...

To be fair the reason that it alarmed everyone was due to romangg himself. He called an Opt In system to be user Hostile and that Opt Out was the only way. There's also some data that they collect that is questionable in how it would help the developers with improving the OS like monitor models, gpu models, which port you set each monitor to. From what I heard from people it's more the Manjaro team doesn't know what they're doing rather than them being nefarious. Which after reading Romangg's posts I can agree with that :P I really don't think he knows what he's really doing :P Which is also why I'm skeptical if he will listen to everyone in the end and change it to Opt In, will just have to see what he does whenever he officially launches it, MDD is in the Manjaro repo for testing purposes currently. But I do see Manjaro themselves have a history once I started digging up them on youtube :P Letting their security license expire 4 times? :P

I tri-boot on my couch gaming rig. But it's 3 separate SSDs with their own OS. I like to have separate storage devices for my OSes instead of risking something having them on the same drive. Granted one of the OSes in that machine's only purpose is to run rEFInd so I can easily switch between the other two :p One is an immutable and the other is Batocera so not the easiest of OSes to set up a grub/rEFInd on that I just bought a cheap 500gb SSD to handle it on it's own. I also distro hopped again today from Fedora back to PikaOS :p My normal just jump around after awhile

 

[Leon]

Parted is the very basics. I wouldn't even install Windows and only Windows without a grub rescue disc and properly formatting my drive with partitions adapted to the planned use of the box. That's something people should figure out *before* planning to install anything, so they don't get stuck after the fact, afraid to resize something and unable to find 4 GB to test another distro on their 2TB drives. XD

And Grub and SystemD-boot can break themselves, just like everything they don't need that damn Windows automatic startup repair for that. That's why people keep their data backed up and a few bootable dongles to rescue their stuff. I never had an OS completely fried by dualbooting.

Have you guys ever build a new PC from scratch, and got something not properly working that you had to troubleshoot? What do you write for the sendback after testing the piece? That it didn't work on Arch/Ubuntu/Fedora or whatever distro flavor you fashion? Here if you cant prove it wasn't properly working on the OS that's written on the box, you can kiss your refund goodbye. And usually that OS is win10. Sad but true.

Let me be clear, i did all that, it had somehow corrupted the os so much that parted and the repair disk thought i never installed a bootloader at all, but still asked for it in a loop, meaning it probably fried the linux equivalent of the master boot record beyond repair.
Like i said i backed everything up before it happened so it wasn't too hard to get back up and running, but oh wow did that put me off partitioning my main drive.

Post automatically merged: May 16, 2025

To be fair the reason that it alarmed everyone was due to romangg himself. He called an Opt In system to be user Hostile and that Opt Out was the only way. There's also some data that they collect that is questionable in how it would help the developers with improving the OS like monitor models, gpu models, which port you set each monitor to. From what I heard from people it's more the Manjaro team doesn't know what they're doing rather than them being nefarious. Which after reading Romangg's posts I can agree with that :P I really don't think he knows what he's really doing :P Which is also why I'm skeptical if he will listen to everyone in the end and change it to Opt In, will just have to see what he does whenever he officially launches it, MDD is in the Manjaro repo for testing purposes currently. But I do see Manjaro themselves have a history once I started digging up them on youtube :P Letting their security license expire 4 times? :P

I tri-boot on my couch gaming rig. But it's 3 separate SSDs with their own OS. I like to have separate storage devices for my OSes instead of risking something having them on the same drive. Granted one of the OSes in that machine's only purpose is to run rEFInd so I can easily switch between the other two :p One is an immutable and the other is Batocera so not the easiest of OSes to set up a grub/rEFInd on that I just bought a cheap 500gb SSD to handle it on it's own. I also distro hopped again today from Fedora back to PikaOS :p My normal just jump around after awhile

Actually monitor model makes sense for another reason, gpu syncing, my monitor if it's above 144hz in settings will sometimes downclock my gpu's vram to 96mhz, the cause of this seems to be monitor based, not os based, apparently it can also rarely happen on windows on some really obscure models but mine is a gigabyte, it apparently has something to do with the mesa drivers.