I gave the Manjaro Mate distro a spin recently. It’s based on Arch Linux.
This distro is fast. On my laptop (with an SSD drive) it takes around 12 seconds from power up to usable desktop. The same machine running Slackware takes 2 or 3 times as long. In the time it takes Slackware to log me out of KDE, Manjaro has shut the system down.
It’s constructed along the “1 app per task” basis, so comes with sylpheed for Mail, midori as browser, etc. The pacman (package manager) has a decent selection of applications available - all the usual suspects, so you can tailor it to meet your preferences.
The installer is ncurses based and offers 2 possibilities - the stable installer (only uses 1 hard drive, so if you have more than 1 it isn’t going to be available at setup time) and the unstable one which can see more than 1 drive, but which I could not get to boot successfully post-install.
This is a newish distro, the community around it is small. It has no LinuxQuestions forum of its own and over at the Arch forums they will not answer Manjaro related questions. Manjaro does have its own forum, but it would appear as though activity is rather low at the moment.
If you’re a compulsive distro-hopper, or just bored with your current distro, (and are confident enough to throw yourself into the deep end of a new pool) then Manjaro is worth a look.
It comes in 32 and 64 bit versions with KDE, Openbox, Cinnamon, Mate and xfce flavours. The install disks are “Live” so you can see it first before installing and come with proprietary drivers (nvidia, flash etc). At boot you can choose ‘with or without non-free drivers’.
Thinking about it … much as I would like to say otherwise, MATE/Gnome 2’s use of dual panels are probably not a good fit for a netbook with their lack of screen height … that’s not saying they couldn’t be tweaked, I just mean by default.
Do you reckon it would be a good addition to the "Netbook Distro List" page ?
I had Manjaro (LXDE edition) installed on my Eeepc 1000H for a while in December.
It was running extreamly well, had no real problems with it. Only to find that they have dropped that version for Openbox.
Dissapointed with their decision, I promptly replaced it with a clean install of Arch + LXDE.
Which runs equally fast (in stock 1 GiB ram) and longevity more or less guarantead.
After all Manjaro is just a boxed version of Arch. If you are after an easy install for Arch I would recommend Archbang then adding the DE like LXDE.
The Mate edition uses 1 panel, at the top of the screen. Customisation is as easy as it ought to be. (Unlike the Cinnamon version which is counter-intuitive).
I’ve put the KDE version of Manjaro on my desktop (a great deal more fiddling is required - no extra codecs come with and the default pacman mirror (in Germany) is no longer available). That said, once I’d uncommented the UK mirror, it took me about 2 minutes to find out what I needed to know to use it to upgrade and add the extras.
Having come from Slackware, which is rock solid, but rather slow, Manjaro is like having a new computer.
There are some gotchas - I couldn’t get the installer to work with more than 1 drive. One has to add a file to /etc/polkit-1/rules.d to override the system requirement for a password to be entered for mounting extra partitions on each boot. But overall, they’ve made a fine job. My laptop (despite having a seriously nasty screen) seems to be one of those machines were Linux just works - wireless, keyboard Fn buttons, card reader, etc, all worked out of the box. Consequently my impressions of it may be rose coloured. So I’m not sure I’m in a position to recommend it for a netbook.
