A Week With Manjaro

So... It's been a while since I last used Linux for good.
Last time was in 2017, after that I started using it only for work. The main reason was because I just couldn't find a distribution that suited me well, the distrohopping bug had caught on to me.
But that might've changed.

Recently I decided to give Manjaro a try, because it looked nice enough, even if the Manjaro team has made a couple of blunders. I didn't mind that. I know some friends who've been using it for well over two years now and never had a problem, so I bit the bullet.

I have experience with Arch, having installed it in the past during my distrohopping binge, but this is nothing like mainline Arch, the installation is a lot simpler.
Sure, if you want Arch and none of the extras of Manjaro, EndeavourOS is worth taking a look at; but I did want the extras. The system here is all ready for me to use, comes with most of the software I needed and the Manjaro Settings Manager is kinda dandy.

I also really like pamac (judge me), and it just works better here, with pamac-all or even just pamac-flatpak not installing for me on Endeavour/Mainline Arch.

I decided to go with KDE this time around, after a good while of using GNOME and Mate at work, I just missed this desktop, and it's come a long long way in the past years. Unfortunately the wayland support is still... Bad, at least on my experience, but Xorg is working fine, even if it's ancient, and I'm sure that soon enough we'll get Wayland under KDE.

As for my gaming experience so far... Yeah, this is a revelation.
Compared to when I left Linux on my main desktop, gaming has changed entirely. No longer do I need to have two instances of Steam running (One native, one Wine), now most games work out of the box and it's crazy to see the number of devs outright marketing support for Linux (or Steam Deck at least, which means Linux).
I've had a wonderful time so far, with most of my Steam Library working right out of the box, with the exception of Paladins (which's free and runs on my laptop) and with Lutris taking care of my non-Steam games such as Overwatch.

I've also decided to give the Heroic Games Launcher a shot, and it's working great so far. Only tried two Epic Games games so far (which worked fine, Alto's Collection and Rogue Legacy) but my GOG collection is all running smooth.

As for Xbox Game Pass, I'm sticking to Xcloud, which is something I was doing even under Windows anyway.

So far, I'm having a great time, and if I find myself just not booting into Windows again, I think I'll just nuke that partition entirely.
I've been seeing the penguin at work everyday of the week, but now it'll mean more than just boring old work, I just really hope Manjaro doesn't break on me too easily.

2017 screenshot from when I used Kubuntu