I’m sorry but it’s not great for beginners. It’s a rolling bleeding edge distro that does not break often but when it does you need to know how stuff works to fix it.

It’s still better than no sandbox at all, isn’t it? And who installs their OS on an HDD in 2024?

6 years ago Proton was a thing. It worked out of the box with Steam games like it does today. Yes not everything was gold rated on protondb but it worked fine. I’ve been gaming on Linux since 2018.

ZFS encryption works fine but AFAIK it’s complicated to do full disk encryption (for the OS drive) - this is easy to do with with luks. ZFS is not complicated and just works - at least that was my experience. There is also a lot of help available online.

Is it possible to build a minimal image for my home server without gnome etc? Thank you!

I love Debian, but isn’t testing frozen for some time before the release of the next stable? I think during the freeze you won’t even get security updates.

Salty arch users downvoting… smh

Thank you for explaining and sharing your journey.

Regarding 1: A system not booting anymore really is a major issue. Maybe I was lucky to not have encountered that, maybe didn’t happen because I use a custom kernel. Regarding the certs: Honestly I don’t really care about the Manjaro website. The certs of the package repositories are important to me though.

Regarding 2: I’m using the AUR to install some third-party applications like “gpu-screen-recorder”. If you use it for system packages it will cause problems, because the Manjaro repos are delayed on purpose. One would encounter the same problem when using Debian stable and installing system stuff from a PPA.

Can you elaborate what didn’t work on Manjaro? Just curious, I’ve been using it on my gaming rig for over 5 years without problems.

sounds reasonable to me /s

If you’re already on linux there is no need to install special tools. Simply copy the iso directly to the USB device.

dd if=distribution.iso of=/dev/sdX bs=1M && sync

The cp command will write the ISO file directly onto the device. This is the official way that is recommended by Debian:

cp debian.iso /dev/sdX

Source: https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/amd64/ch04s03.en.html

I’ll translate “almost snap free” for you: It’s still using snap for some stuff that wouldn’t work without snap. Avoid Ubuntu.

Using a de-bloated Ubuntu reminds me of my time on Windows - had to use a bunch of tools to disable all kind of sh*t. Not doing this again, Ubuntu will never be a choice for me.

Debian + Flatpak for Gaming (Steam, Heroic Mangohud, etc.)

I’m asking because I’ve used Manjaro for the last 5 years without problems. I think a lot of arguements against Manjaro here are just based on “that’s what I’ve read somewhere”.

I’'m using Lutris to play games on Epic:

• Create a new wine/proton prefix
• Put the epic launcher installer on C:, set it as the exe to run in the Lutris settings, run it and install.
• Change the executable to the exe of the installed epic launcher. Run the launcher, install and play your game.

I’m using a separate wine/proton prefix for each game. This allows to appy custom proton settings and workarounds per game. The epic launcher is about 250mb so it doesn’t waste that much disk space.

Can you provide a source about when and what package was broken?

The hate is not justified IMHO. I’ve used Manjaro for 5 years now and never had any problems. It just works.

LMDE is Debian with Cinnamon (including the xapps). If you use LMDE with KDE you are basically using plain debian (except for some weirdly replaced packages like “adduser” and libpolkit).