There are many cases where Manjaro causes problems. For example, a package mag already be in Arch but not yet in Manjaro. Or perhaps the Manjaro package is not a high enough version number. If another Arch package requires this first package, in Arch it would grab the Arch package. The Arch package will be maintained over time. In Manajaro, the package is not there and so the AUR grabs it from the AUR as well. Perhaps it is even the Git version with an unclear version number. Over time, the AUR dependency breaks or becomes unmaintained. Even once Manjaro has the package, it may not migrate it because of the version numbers. Now things are broken. This exact thing happened to me on Manjaro where my GIMP ended up using GEGL from the AUR. My system was broken for months.
An even worse problem can happen when there are alternate dependencies. Sometimes in the AUR you will have multiple packages that fulfill a dependency. In Arch, you can see if one is from the actual repos and one is itself from the AUR. Again, if you choose the one in the repos, it will work and stay supports. In Manjaro, neither may be coming from the actual repos in which case it is easy to choose the wrong one. This sets you up to have package conflicts. In Manjaro, I would never know that the other option had now been added to the repos. More than once, I had the dependency that I had chosen break when the other would still have been fine.
Ok, this is getting long and that was just a couple of scenarios.
Suffice it to say, when I used Manjaro, I got the impression that the AUR broke all the time and that using the AUR broke my install from time to time. Now that I use Arch, I do not have those issues and I realize that it was Manjaro all along.
A lot of people are saying its the best. Perhaps they are right. I don’t kmow. And I hear it all the time. “It’s the best! It’s the best!”. Who knows. But a lot of great people are saying it. Maybe the best people. That’s just what I hear.
The only benefit that OpenOffice had was the name. Given the momentum that LibreOffice had early on, OpenOffice should clearly have joined with them and maybe ceded the name.
I am glad that LibreOffice did not try to merge back with OpenOffice as clearly it remains a poorly managed project. The continued existence of OpenOffice is doing tremendous damage to the wider ecosystem. The fact that Apache continues to promote the project not only reflects badly in them but show what poor stewards they are. I would not have wanted their lead ship to have hampered the subsequent success of LibreOffice. The whole episode just proves that LibreOffice was right to break away and not just because of Oracle.
The basic GUI experience in X is provided by the window manager. It controls how your windows are placed ( eg. Tiling vs Stacking / Floating ), how they are decorated ( eg. Max / Min / Close buttons ), and how they behave ( eg. Click to focus ). In X, the window manager runs as an application on the X server. You can only use one at a time.
In Wayland, the “window manager” is the display-server too and is called a compositor. For smaller projects, there are compositor libraries that provide similar capabilities to what the X server did so that these projects can concentrate on the “window manager” part. You can think of a Wayland compositor as equivalent to an X window manager ).
A Desktop Environment comes with a window manager ( or compositor ) and adds other tools that run alongside ( or on top of ) the window manager to provide a full user experience. This may include panels ( eg. think Windows start button, icon bar, and status tray ), docks ( like MacOS ), global menus, notification applets, and the desktop surface itself ( eg. are there icons or other features on the desktop ). A DE usually comes with a standard set of basic applications like a file manager, image viewer, document viewer, media player, and the like.
If you start with a basic window manager then yes you have to add all this other stuff yourself. Of course you may not want some of it and so can have a much lighter experience. You can also just choose tools that you like. Of course, they may not match visually or work perfectly together.
If you use a DE, the experience is curated for you and everything is more likely to work well out of the box. That said, nothing stops you from swapping out whatever components you want. You can even use a different window manager than the DE default.
When is the last time you tried Intel hardware and with what software? I ask because your links do not really tell the same story as your post.
The first link says that Mesa got “more Intel optimizations”. That sounds like a good thing. It basically says the same thing about AMD and NVIDIA. The only GPU “crash” that was addressed was for AMD which is widely regarded as the best option for Linux. I would not read that article and come away with any concerns about Intel.
The second link says that kernel 6.2 added “full Intel support”. We are now in kernel 6.7. I use a rolling release and how a much newer kernel than 6.2. A brief Google leads me to believe that 6.5 ships with both Ubuntu 23.10 and Fedora 39.
I have not used these cards myself so I do it know but others have said the experience was decent now. The OP does not seem that demanding. If it ok now and actively improving, he may be quite happy. It sounds better than nouveau for sure. Is it really as bad as you say?
I suspect it is a combination of its being free, working well on older hardware, and the tech literacy in India.
Software development and engineering are important aspects of the Indian economy. Linux is arguably the best platform for that kind of work, especially in the cloud. Tech support of those kinds of systems require the same skills.
Given how well Linux runs on older machines, I consider low Linux penetration a hallmark of rich countries.
In my own household, Linux goes on all the older hardware ( including Macs ). That has really extended the length of time before hardware needs to be replaced. It also means that, over time, the percentage of active equipment using Linux has increased.
As somebody who lives in an area with an active logging industry, I can tell you that parts of the world with an economic interest in their forests still have lots of trees whereas areas that do not are very likely to have destroyed most of theirs.
The relationship between paper use and the environment is not what you think it is.
As somebody that first configured X back in 1991, I agree with this message.
To be fair though, with KMS, libdrm, and libinput, setting up X is 1000 times easier than it used to be. I suspect most users never even need to open Xorg.conf or even know it exists.
Ironically, all these technologies are also used by Wayland. A lot of what Wayland does not do, Xorg basically does not do either.