I was enticed to install Ez-Linux. It did not work for me. So it was with endeavour i3 as well. After a series of mis-steps I have just spent at least two weeks distro-hopping, recovering from blown installs, trying a number i3 distros. I have been intrigued by CentOS; however, the install was a puzzle beyond my skill or desire to learn.
It's been a while since ez linux install, so I cannot remember what went wrong. Basically just about everything. Garuda was not nice; don't remember why. Endeavour was not good enough, and too far outside my previous experience with i3. So I turned back to Arch, Manjaro, and, this week, ArchBang!.
Manjaro has been my goto, no question, for years, whenever I am stuck and need to get back up quickly; and it is robust---enough so that I have (until this week) been running the same install for many months with no problem. It also works well for whatever I use systemrescuecd for---a workflow that would be lame to a linux guru. I have yet to recover an install that would not boot: I can just do a quick Manjaro install. I'm fed up with the fiddly changes I have to make each time. I do say, though, I am getting better at them. Refining.
In fact, my workflow relies upon a number of applications that I compile from upstream source, and I have edited configurations for various packages.
The most recent revelations were about ArchBang!. This distro just went over to i3, and it's touted, IIUC, to be a pretty much straight Arch install, using Arch repos. Manjaro does not play nice when I try to use Arch repos---which requires some configuring: the Manjaro repos are supposedly vetted, and released a bit behind Arch. IIRC Manjaro's unstable branch is pretty much the same as Arch's stable. Manjaro has a nice tool for kernels and other system goodies like nvidia drivers: mhwd. A forgotten acronym.
The issue with repos bothers me. I finally installed Arch vanilla on my beastly machine, and many, many packages. It's working well enough, no recent issues, but I haven't bored in on much work. We'll see.
The laptop is another matter. I've had manjaro working for a long, long time. It's a c.2010 Lenovo Yoga, 13" (small for my eyes, but workable). One low hanging issue has been the synaptics trackpad; recently it's become a major show stopper on, at the very least, ArchBang!. I've been wrestling with Archbang for 2 or 3 days, and it's been a slog.
I cannot count the issues, but there were some big ones, on which I spent hours of valuable time: especially printing and the synaptics touchpad. The overall impression of ArchBang! has been unfavorably, but I like the close adherence to real Arch. But there are too many nits.
One example is printing. I have installed drivers and cups for my Epson ET-4750 printer more than a dozen times on Arch-based distros. It's a piece of cake. But on ArchBang! I was stymied. I will never know why, because I will never try to install ArchBang! again. Sufficeth to say that after installing and enabling cups, a persistent message attended every attempt to install the printer, a Server Error. I have never encountered this message EVER before. Multiple google searches later... no idea... For this reason alone, ArchBang! is unusable to me.
A glaring difference between Manjaro and ArchBang! is handling of the Synaptics touchpad. I had spent hours tweaking the configuration for Synaptics on ArchBang!, and it was good enough to usually type somewhat smoothly. I reflected that this has not happened in a long while, though I remembered having to do this in the distant past. Then an epiphany: I booted into a Manjaro live USB drive, and the typing experience was perfect!
At this point, I installed Manjaro, mistakenly overwrote the ArchBang! partition, but i don't regret it at all.
One other way that ArchBang! worked differently was found when I tried to log in as root: ArchBang did not allow me to log in as root, but did allow using su and sudo in a terminal on an X screen. Mr. Google told me that this issue had been encountered by others. It was this issue that required me to boot into Manjaro, to mount and edit the passwd file. At least i THINK that was how it went. I forget.
I didn't appreciate the wallpaper on i3, and the odd bindings, especially Mod+t to open a terminal; the upstream bindings, Mod+Return did not work.
Manjaro just works.
One modest tweak that shows thoughtfulness of the decisions made during assembly of Manjaro's OS is seen in the configuration of grub2, remembering the previous of multiple boots.
Manjaro's i3 conky displays not only system information, but also the most important keybindings on the root screen! I have leveraged this ingenious setup, editing to include MY useful keybindings, the ones I edited into the config file myself.. I liked the popup pdf help page, and even edited a personalized version, but it was too much work to keep up with my frequent added bindings. I think it would be possible to write a tool to scan the config file and produce a text or pdf file on the fly; or perhaps a script could do this in a few keystrokes; then it would be more useful to me.
I cannot say enough about the perfect configuration of the Synaptic touchpad in Manjaro. I have not investigated the diffs between the configurations in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/ . Too bad I won't have a chance to do so, because I will not boot ArchBang! again, ever.
Overall the impression was that ArchBang! is an idiosyncratic distribution, possibly the work of a small group of hobbyists. Manjaro GNU/Linux i3 community edition has consistently performed. i3 still runs at a decent rate of speed on a 10 year old laptop, albeit an i7---an earlier mobile i7, though.
One final point: Arch GNU/Linux is not terribly hard to get running. Manjaro GNU/Linux is much easier. More to the point, Manjaro incorporates intelligent configuration defaults that allow me to bypass weeks of tentative fiddling on an Arch install. That said, this epiphany stilll leaves me wanting to learn how to integrate manjaro-like tweaks into my Arch GNU/Linux install on my main machine.
