Essential tweaks after Manjaro (Plasma) installation
Updated: September 28, 2019
You know I’m no Arch fan. But I am also impressed by the efforts to transform the ultra-nerdy Arch
into a friendly system accessible to the masses. This is primarily done by Manjaro, which is blazing an
honest path of creativity down the Linux highway. I’ve recently tested version
18.0.4 Illyria Plasma, and found it to be quite solid.
There were lots of problems, but then, there were also some super-cool features.
To help you get along, I’ve compiled this article – it’s mostly the summary of tweaks and changes I
introduced to the installed Manjaro system, in order to get a smooth, seamless experience replete with
good software, good looks and proprietary drivers. Now, there’s also the
Xfce review, and we might do some tweaks for that
edition, too. But now, we only focus on the Plasma spin. To wit, let us commence.
1. Free versus nonfree
This is almost too trivial – but easy to not notice. When booting into the live session, the Manjaro
menu allows you to switch between using free drivers for your hardware, like Nouveau, or proprietary
drivers, like Nvidia. This is not limited to just graphics cards, but it illustrates the point well.
You might not notice this, and you could end up using the distro in a mode you did not intend. If you
do choose nonfree, you will have the proprietary drivers out of the box, and you won’t need to do any
other setups.
However, even if you do make a choice – you can always change it afterwards. In the Settings tool,
there’s an entire section of Manjaro-specific configurations – these used to be previously offered as a
separate control panel, but they are now nicely integrated into Plasma. Here, under Hardware
Configuration, you can select what drivers you want to use – open-source (free) or proprietary. There’s
also a wizard to setup graphics drivers automatically.
2. Package management tweaks
This is the most important element. By default, Manjaro Plasma uses Octopi as its UI frontend, and
pacman as the command-line utility. You have access to several repositories with a decent set of
programs, but Manjaro no longer supports AUR (officially), which means many third-party packages aren’t
instantly available.
You can work around this by using a second package manager – pamac. You have the option to install
the command-line tool (pamac-cli), the UI (gtk version is default, qt is experimental), and also the
tray indicator that works well in Plasma desktops.
Once Pamac is installed, launch the program, and then change its settings to enable AUR. Once you
have this functionality, you can search for third-party software and install it. You can continue using
pacman for normal system updates without conflicts (within reason).
3. Additional software
The next step is to install some nice programs. In the Plasma edition, I needed GIMP and
LibreOffice, but then you can install tons of other cool programs (like say Kdenlive, Clementine or
Chromium). I also installed Google Chrome and Skype via Pamac/AUR. You can use the graphical package
manager or the command line.
pacman -Sy gimp libreoffice-fresh
4. Theming tweaks
In the Plasma test, I noticed that Microsoft Office Online icons were not available in my installed
system – this could entirely be the result of re-using the home directory. However, if you encounter
this problem, you may want to consider testing different icons themes. For me, neither Breeze nor
Breath offered necessary icons, but Papirus did.
5. Icons-only task manager tweaks
I also noticed some inconsistent behavior with several applications. Namely: the icon would change
depending on whether the application was running or not; pinned applications would show up with a
second, unpinned icon at the end of the task manager; pinned applications would not always start. The
easy solution to this issue was to pin applications through the system menu rather than using the
right-click menu for running programs. This sounds like a glitch, but if you encounter it, you have
this tweak.
6. Samba sharing
By default, Manjaro Illyria does not ship with the necessary package that allows Samba sharing. To
that end, you will need to install the following – and possibly also make a
manual client protocol tweak to be able to connect to
Windows boxen.
sudo pacman -Sy manjaro-settings-samba
7. Samba printer browse & configuration
This may only be specific to the Plasma edition – but the Browse button in the Samba share
configuration section in the Printer wizard is grayed out. I did try several tricks, similar to my
attempt to enable printing in
CentOS 7, but none of these really helped.
However, you can always resort to the same old trick I’ve tried in various KDE distros where the
problem would manifest – use the system-config-printer, the old Gnome 2 era utility that always works.
If not installed already, then grab it:
sudo pacman -Sy system-config-printer
Run from the command line, wait for the wizard to launch, and configure your printers!
Conclusion
Thus endeth the article. Hopefully, this was useful. Overall, Manjaro has a lot of cool features,
but it also suffers from various sub-optimal default settings. Luckily, changing most of them is
relatively easy, and in the worst case, you need to install a few packages. The biggest challenge is
installing third-party software, for which you need AUR (unless you want to do things manually). But
it’s all doable.
With some luck, these issues will be ironed out in future releases of Manjaro. If not provided as
defaults, then at least, there will be an easy path for users to grab the desired software and install
it in a friendly, simple, straightforward fashion. Well, I guess that would be all. Manjaro away.