Manjaro - Part 2

📅 25 Dec 2021

I found myself sitting here on Christmas day and I wasn’t sure what to get into. My family had celebrated our Christmas the day before. I wanted to be productive but I also wanted to enjoy my time. I didn’t want to do something that necessarily felt like work.

So I decided to spend most of the day playing around on Manjaro :)

A quick recap: I previously wrote about how I had installed Manjaro KDE on an old ASUS laptop. I wrote 99% of this post from this laptop.

So, I first started this post in Kate, the text editor included with Manjaro. To be honest, I didn’t like it. I have never really used a basic text editor to do my writing and I found it stale and sterile.

And thus the process began to choose a text editor. I have used Atom for probably two years. I first started using it when I was just getting into Python and have used it for pretty much all writing ever since.

But guess what? When I went to download it for Manjaro, I noticed the size: 273MB??!!

Given that I really have nothing else installed on this machine other than LibreWolf, I kinda didn’t want to ruin it. Not that this would ruin it per se but it just felt wrong.

Next I started digging. I found an article on itsfoss that was specifically geared toward creative writing I believe, but one specific tool caught my eye: Ghostwriter. It just sounded cool and looked right. Plus, it was only 56MB. Since this isn’t a review of a specific tool I won’t elaborate but needless to say I finished this post up using Ghostwriter.

On a side note, it kind of encourages me to take back up some creative writing. But that’s a different story for a different day.

OK, so I kept working on this post on the side but I also wanted to keep messing with Manjaro itself. What else could I do?

I had previously messed around with themes for about 10 minutes when I first installed it. I found the user interface much more intuitive than Mint when it came to themes and appearances which was interesting. I had previously installed a nice cursor pack but wasn’t completely happy with the windows appearance.

I did some digging around and found a nice global theme. That paired with the cursors I had installed previously and I was very happy with everything. I try not to change themes too often because I find that I’m never completely satisfied. I’d rather find something I like moderately and just stick it out. When I find time later, whether it be 2 months or 2 years, I can make changes then.

Next up was getting my bluetooth earbuds connected. This has been a constant source of problems on my HP laptop running Mint. For some reason, the bluetooth drops out after any period of inactivity (i.e. sleep, logging out, etc.). It will then work again briefly after I restart, only to cut out again after inactivity. I have searched forums far and wide and have tried all of the solutions mentioned to no avail. It isn’t a serious enough issue for me to change distros over. However, if I keep liking Manjaro it might be hard not to switch. Although there is no guarantee that would fix the problem, as it may be the laptop and not the distro.

Regardless, bluetooth on this machine works perfectly and I was up and running, listening to music and watching movies.

Now that I had bluetooth taken care of I was off to checking out spreadsheets. I have a bit of an odd workflow and end up using spreadsheets for a lot. I use them for everything from writing out exercise and nutrition plans to the occasional to-do list. I’m not sure why this is but it’s what I’m used to.

Fortunately for me, even though Manjaro comes pre-installed with very little, it does have ONLYOFFICE. I had never used it before but it was very similar to Excel and would serve it’s purpose if I ever needed to use it on this machine.

Honestly, the more I messed around, the more I was thinking, “Heck, why don’t I just dual-boot this on my HP?” Then I would have Mint and Manjaro on one machine and would be free to mess around as much as I wanted. So that’s what I did.

Other than re-sizing some partitions, everything went smoothly and I was up and running Manjaro on my HP laptop in probably ten minutes. I spent a few minutes matching the themes I had going on this one and then set it aside for a while. There would be plenty of time to play around more. And most importantly, bluetooth seems to be working!

And I think that will be the end of this post. I did spend around another hour messing around but mainly just with some settings, applications, etc. Now that I have Manjaro dual-booting on my HP laptop that will probably be another post. Then, we’ll see what my long-term plans are with this laptop :)

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