I wanted to like Manjaro, I really did, especially since the I3 WM spin allows me to run both Firefox and GIMP simultaneously on aging hardware without the fan going so hard the rig sounds like it's about to take flight into space. After all, Manjaro is a distro that supposedly allows playing all sorts of Steam games on GNU+Linux with minimal fuss and setup. I can't verify that, though. I didn't get as far as logging in to my Steam account and checking, even though I installed the requisite software.

After only two weeks of using Manjaro every day, I encountered a problem. Trying to install and configure a LAMPP stack, something I've done plenty of times on Debian with little to no issue, turned out to be nearly a mission impossible on Manjaro. Frankly, I couldn't be bothered to go through the rigmarole of diagnosing and fixing issues with a process that "just works" on Debian. If ease of use and stability comes at the cost of being quite behind the curve and likely a little old, that's fine by me. I don't need to be at the forefront of the bleeding edge (considering I'm not even running the latest version of Debian). I'll take tried and tested for the sake of peace of mind and actually getting work done, assuming I get my considerably reluctant and procrastinating arse into gear, but that's a "me" problem.

You might make fun of me and Debian (the old man set in his ways and whom changes little), but I have tried other distributions (including Fedora, which I also wanted to like, and Arch) and settled on the one for me. I use Debian, BTW, and I'm happy with that.

I'm sure I'll be able to set up LXQt or I3 as my WM of choice on it, rather than go down a time-wasting rabbit hole trying to get LAMPP and Steam (with Proton and Vulkan) working on an Arch-based distro. Arch seems harder than it needs to be, IMO. Just installing it can be a mission in of itself (although Manjaro does make the process quite simple, to its credit).

At any rate I'm just glad I made the switch to using GNU+Linux for almost everything about a month or two before I found out that Microsoft has made a scare AI thing that uses Copilot to record absolutely everything a user does on a machine running Windows 11. This goes far beyond just collecting browser history and metadata, which is bad enough and which I find scary AF! I assume you know how I feel about both AI and privacy ...

On that note, I'm off to set up a LAMPP stack on the Debian machine I'm using to type this. Until next time,
Snark out!