I'm back!!

[beardedgeek72]

Well, I haven't been here for long, and I wasn't gone all that long either...

Long story short:
Jumped on the Linux train in 2006. Got really hooked. Could afford a new gaming laptop 2007. Never got around to dual boot.
Jumped back on the Linux train May 2018.

Has gone through:
Antergos
Vanilla Arch
SwagArch
Manjaro
OpenSuse Tumbleweed
Siduction
MX Linux (18)
Fedora
Mageia

I have, for the time being after that, three distros plus W10 (I have the space, so I'm just going to keep it for games): Manjaro Xfce, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed Xfce and MX Linux 18. I cannot pick between them, so I am running them all :P
I think that I would recommend either for a non-linux user, except that if the person picked SUSE I would do the install for them. Just to be sure. After that all three are rock solid and brilliant.

Manjaro is the one that's most polished from an onlooker's perspective (small things, like the wallpaper being automatically copied to the background of the login screen for the user is one of those small, stupid things that still says "polish").
Suse is very polished but boring, as a company product should be, I guess, mainly used in offices. MX is almost there. It has an amazing functionality, but it could use maybe 5% more polish. A few edges that could be a little smother. Mind you I am ONLY talking looks here. Not functinality, where MX is... frakking awesome.

But again, as I said, I cannot, honestly, choose between them.

The reason I said "I am back?" I replaced MX with Fedora Xfce for two weeks, but... there are just too many... odd little things breaking that shouldn't. Fedora Gnome is amazingly stable, but the spinns are spinns and don't get the same love, it seems. An example? As silly as the Mugshot plugin not existing in the repos.

[asqwerth]

...

...like the wallpaper being automatically copied to the background of the login screen for the user is one of those small, stupid things that still says "polish")....

Are you kidding me?? Another example of where everyone's preferences and tastes are all so different.

I recall that on quite a few of my real and virtualbox installs of Manjaro, I had previously set my own choice of background for the login screen and then one day, it just switched from that to whatever was the current wallpaper on the desktop. That annoyed me no end because I have randomly changing wallpaper on my desktop but that's not what I want to happen on my login screen.

Isn't there a general rule that updates should not change the personal settings of the user? I had to run the lightdm-greeter-settings tool to untick the setting to use the user's desktop background (which wasn't enabled previously on first installation) .

I can't recall for sure now, but this happened at least once on a real metal install on my laptop (switched in 2018 from unstable repo to stable repo) and 2 virtualbox installs of Manjaro isos released in 2018 (maybe it was Manjaro 18 Illyria where it happened). My 2015 real metal install on PC was untouched by this madness, as far as I can remember. So something changed in the 2018 release(s).

[ADDED: or perhaps it's because my 2015 install uses Variety to change wallpapers on my desktop while the affected installs didn't have variety and had their desktop wallpaper applied by the desktop environment's native wallpaper function. If so, that means that the user settings was forcibly changed for all installs, it just didn't get applied on my 2015 install due to Variety]

Apart from that, I do agree that Manjaro is a bit more polished aesthetically. Perhaps it helps that they have many more artistic members prolifically creating lots of wallpapers just for fun on their forums, plus a signature shade of green they are able to use as "branding". They also have customised default gtk themes using said signature colour. But both distros are good in my eyes.


Anyway, welcome back!

[beardedgeek72]

Oh it's a matter of taste.
Also, despite being a rolling release they change things in their numbered releases, so what happened, probably, was that you were at idk Manjaro 15 when you installed it, and when they released 16, they also released new updated themed packages. But I agree, updates should leave dotfiles alone.

[manyroads]

As a long time manjaro user... I never had problems keeping my desktop as I wanted. I, also, have a nice, stable, consistent look on my desktops here. Of the two, I personally like the MX Tools and would not want to be without them, no matter the distro. I'm getting bit too old to cobble everything together for myself. Those days of fun have past me by...