Manjaro now has improved documentation: a wiki and beginners’ installation guide.

The desktop of the live session has icons for the installation guide and the installer. The HD will need to be set up first, and gparted is provided. Manjaro has a standard Xfce desktop, plus Conky. Software includes Firefox, Pidgin, Skype, Thunderbird, Xchat, Gimp, DeaDBeef audio, Smplayer video, Gimp, and LibreOffice. Running from the GUI, DeadBeef and Gimp gave minor warnings and LibreOffice complained about not having Java; the rest were fine. If you don’t like installing software from the command line, there are two gui tools: one searches but doesn’t install, the other installs but does a very poor job on searching!

Now for the problems. Unlike last time, the disk had a vesa driver, but I still needed to tell Manjaro to use it: the hardware detection doesn’t work properly. When I tried to play videos, nothing worked. I eventually discovered that I had only the vesa driver, which is not up to the job. I tried to install the SiS driver, only to be told it wasn’t compatible with the X server.

If you have more modern hardware, you wouldn’t have that sort of problem, but it does indicate poor quality. The forum also seemed to have a lot of people with problems for such a small user base. If you want an installer for Arch, try Bridge. If you just want a rolling-release distro, Fuduntu, Solus, and Swift are excellent.