cross-posted from: https://feddit.ch/post/4192351
New Manjaro Linux Gaming Handheld from OrangePi
This is exciting! A gaming handheld from a great open source hardware company that makes SBCs like the RP5. It looks to have all the quality features and combines the best of all the handhelds I’ve seen. This has me really excited.
I am wondering though what gaming on Manjaro Linux is like if anyone knows. I’ve heard of Bazzite and Nobara as well as Chimera and HoloISO which are all focused around gaming. Does Manjaro ship with all the gaming features preinstalled?
They do a decent job of piggy backing on Arch’s work, and loading quite a few things OOB for gaming. That being said, I don’t recommend them due to their instability and issues with the overall project (failing on cert renewals, their withholding of stable packages from Arch but allowing AUR access and causing breakage, poor release schedule, and cherry picking of newer packages for “shiny things” without the diligence to maintain their library compatibility, etc etc).
That being said, their theming and UI taste is actually really good. It was a much more robust project back in 2019 and 2020, but on the technical side they’re lacking severely despite having great taste from a theming standpoint. They’ve fallen pretty far in the court of public opinion.
The certs were for their website, it had nothing to do with the OS. I used Manjaro for almost two years without any issues. Meanwhile, EndeavourOS broke completely after a few months due to an update and their toxic community just gaslighted & trolled me to the point where the admins closed & hid the thread (can’t have people see that huh?) and suggested I create a new one if I still needed support.
It sucks you had an experience like that with the community. There are elitists and then just big jerks. What communities often fail at is a groupthink issue where they have a solution to a problem that’s extraneous to most people, but they accept it as “well duh, RTFM”.
Their project’s goal seems to be the adoption of use, broad use and in turn contribution. The problem is their attitudes toward problems that still need to be resolved, and the release management combined with stability is a common problem in much more than just Endeavor’s community. You see the issue in Pop!, Nobara, Arch, and even Ubuntu. You even see this BIGTIME in Gnome and to a lesser degree KDE.
A Gnome developer will tell you that you should just use it their way, and not expect basic shit to work, where at least KDE puts it for consideration on their own end to fix or develop.
What I’m getting at in short though is the prevailing attitude of elitism being shitty. That being said, there are people who fall into the “time vampire” group of people who will get pointed toward a solution, but not have the capacity to intuit other basic functions and it pisses people off. Nobody deserves to be treated poorly, but the fine line is out there where it’s up to a user to figure their stuff out. From what you describe, updates breaking the user experience falls solidly on their package maintainers fucking their release schedule in the ass, then having an elitist attitude about how to fix it. They’d just as well keep on trucking and treat people poorly for stuff that their own teams broke, to which I respond, fuck those asshole motherfuckers.
Thanks for the info! This is really useful to know and definitely puts me off a little. I would hope installing another OS would preserve the device features. I started to look into “Manjaro Gaming Edition.” It all looks to be from a few years ago and based on XFCE. However on the device’s website it mentions a Plasma desktop so I wonder if they did a special version for this. One can hope it’ll be a better kept version of the OS from what you said.
Manjaro Gaming Edition was a community thing and has been abandoned for 5 years now. All Manjaro editions are listed on their website: https://manjaro.org/download/
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I haven’t personally used it but Bazzite is a custom image based off of Fedora 39 with preinstalled gaming software and it’s atomic
To be honest, the default themes for many DE’s are actually pretty tasteful. Just vanilla Arch isn’t bad if you don’t mind running the pacman update command. I honestly recommend Nobara for people who want stability and point/click updates.
Endeavor is more like hobbyist UI purist, and not that well optimized. Arch is insanely optimized, as well as Nobara. I would recommend Ubuntu but, Snaps. Pop would be great if their major rebase was further along, so options are pretty limited. We’re in a weird transition right now as far as the major distros and overall performance metrics.
I’m currently running Nobara and personally cannot recommend it due to a lot of annoying issues. Can’t even drag & drop shit out of the FF download window into Dolphin, even though that was working fine on any other distro I used before (including Manjaro, which was still the most stable distro I used).
That to me sounds like their wayland by default setup, which is really more about the wayland ecosystem and reliance on xwayland (although firefox is suppose to launch wayland native on Nobara with KDE).
I’m aware of a few quirks, but that sounds pretty specific. My experience with all DE’s right now has me pretty negative on Linux overall until we get fully migrated to wayland sessions with explicit sync working…and that’s a year off at least.
Wayland is generally a huge mess. At least I can disable Fsync now, which caused my screen to go black for brief moments, especially when playing. Lots of other game or app specific issues remain as well…
I like Mint; it has that Ubuntu ease of use, without Ubuntu’s snap packages.
If you want something geared specifically for gaming, Pop_OS is good. I’m not a fan of how it looks, but I think I’m the minority in that
Pop_OS is known to cause issues with some games running under wine, for that reason I don’t recommend it.
Garuda linux is a good alternative, but it’s got a very “cool” design philosophy that some people might not like.
Opensuse tumbleweed because at least they test software before pushing to users.
Manjaro ran without breaking for me for almost two years. EOS also nuked itself after a few months for me. I think Manjaro’s reputation is worse than the actual distro because a lot of people circlejerked about their failed cert issue (which affected only the website) and the “scandal” about the laptop thingy some years ago.
Skip the bullshit and go straight to Arch. archinstall for a good time.
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I’ve not had problems but nothing is fool-proof and I have proved myself a fool in the past.
In all seriousness I followed the Manjaro - Endeavour - Arch pipeline and don’t see much value in the other flavors outside of a little handholding that can introduce problems of its own.
Yeah we all know Manjaro is ass but a 16:10 screen that’s 120hz is cool. I’d get one if it had adaptive sync. When I saw OrangePi I thought I’d be an ARM device using box86/64 to run Steam games, as inefficient as that sounds.
I thought the same thing but looked out of curiosity and was presently surprised. Glad it wasn’t a Rokchip of some kind or it wouldn’t be so powerful
