Manjaro Budgie - Impressions, performance, desktop experience...
1,412After a year with elementary OS, with a few months here and there spent using other distros and DEs, it was time for a change. My newer build didn't get the performance levels I was expecting from it on that system, so I decided to go with Manjaro, which has been highly recommended. I selected the Budgie edition, since I don't know this specific DE.
Manjaro Budgie
Manjaro is an Arch derivative, first released in 2011, and follow the "rolling release" model, which means there are no new versions, you install it once, and you just update it as it comes.
The desktop
Manjaro ships with a custom Budgie desktop, with a top panel hosting the main menu, a task manager / app shortcuts hybrid, and the notification panel, as well as a quick access to Raven, a Budgie side panel. The default wallpaper is nice, but, weirdly, once you've changed it,you can't set it back, it just doesn't appear in the list. And taht's all: no desktop icons, no app dock, no activities view or plasmoids... Budgie is a very simple desktop experience, and Manjaro did not change that, they kept it light and legible.
Performance
By default, Manjaro Budgie is about as ressource-intensive as any other distro I've ever tried, using 1,2 Gb of RAM. It's similar to GNOME, KDE, or Deepin, or even elementary OS. CPU usage seems lower, though, staying around 1 to 2% when idle, compared to eOS, which could easily go up to 5 or 6% just with Gala, its window manager.
I must say, in use, I didn't notice any difference in snappiness between Manjaro or elementary OS, while I used before.
Default apps
Here is where things started to go wrong. Manjaro Budgie ships with a ton of applications. Like, a lot, probably more than Mint, which already went overboard in my opinion. Amongst these, you'll find great choices, such as Firefox, Nautilus, or Transmission. You'll also get the full LibreOffice suite, and, to complete this, you'll get HexChat, which is an IRC client, absolutely useless for new users, the Brasero Disk burner, questionable in this day and age, Evolution AND Thunderbird, as well as GNOME Calendar, the Lollypop music player, which looks good and simple, as well as Timeshift for backups, and Steam.
Package installation
This brings us to app installation. With Pamac, you can get access to Manjaro's repositories, as well as the AUR, with a quick trip in the app's preferences. This means that almost any software that can run on Linux, will be available natively through these archives.
Installation is easy, even though it's not very legible for a Linux newbie.
Pamac also handles updates, which are presented per-package.
Settings
Manjaro Budgie uses the default GNOME settings app, which is not surprising. Budgie adds its own settings panel, oddly set apart from the GNOME settings, and avaliable through the menu, or through Raven. It offers options to change the look and feel of widgets, icons, and cursors, as well as enabling the dark theme and animations.
You can change fonts and font sizes, and configure a few things in Raven, such as showing or hiding each widget. WIndow management features are also present, with the ability to detach modal dialogs from windows, change the button layout (which doesn't seem to work on apps with headerbars), enable the tiling features or centering new windows on screen.
Finally, you can configure your panels. THis is where you can really tweak how Budgie works, with the ability to create new panels, change the edge of the screen they sit on, allow transparency, auto hiding, change their size, or use a dock mode to use a little space as possible.
Combine this with the different applets you can use, ranging from a simple app menu, to note taking, accessing folders, enabling workspace switching, time tracking or showing the weather, and you've got quite a configurable desktop. These applets, though, don't seem to all work, particularly the window preview, or hot corners ones, which would just show a black square instead of a preview of my windows.
Look and feel
Manjaro Budgie looks good. I said in my Linux Mint review I didn't like green but this might have changed. Manjaro looks bright, with bold colors, and good looking icons. Its theme, called Matcha, implements some transparency, for example in the side panel of the file manager, and plays with red and green to give a nice, modern feeling to the desktop. The use of the Breeze cursor theme, generally used on KDE, is also a nice touch, setting it apart from the usual cursors you see on all other distros, without looking too blingy. The default choices of wallpapers, panels, and thems make Manjaro Budgie a good looking system, which I feel no need to tweak. If you do, though, the Budgie settings come with a huge number of included icons and themes, some of which don't seem to work correctly, with color variants on the Matcha widget theme, and the Papirus icons.
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