Cover photo by Arian Darvishi on Unsplash

The Circumstances Windows has caused me

I’m surely not alone out there when it comes to valid criticism regarding microsoft. For myself it’s been an excuse for a long time to switch back to Linux after my 6 month trial back in 2021. Every person has their own reason why they’re sticking with windows for now, most people are stuck with software that they claim that they can’t replace. But we’re not here to discuss that, we’re here to talk about you wanting to move to Linux and why it should specifically be Manjaro.

Manjaro does an excellent job at being a replacement for windows, by far it offers the most compatability with things while still being one of the more flexible linux flavours. All this comes with it’s caveats which I’m gonna show you how to deal with.

As a requirement, this guide expects you to already have installed Manjaro Linux by yourself, so that you’d be starting out from a fresh slate so to speak. Stuff will be explained based on the KDE Plasma 6 environment, if you chose XFCE instead it should be similar though! We will be setting up common utilities like Steam and other game launchers - and I will explain to you the basics of installing certain pieces of software that you may not come across in the built-in application/package store.

Getting started

You just installed Manjaro Linux, congratulations and welcome to the other side! Depending on the choices you made throughout the installation (e.g. choice of office type suite for documents and spreadsheets) you have one thing or the other already installed, all it takes is getting used to.

In your taskbar you’ll find the ADD/REMOVE PROGRAMS app / package store, it’s a green arrow pointing downwards inside a circle. Here you should click on “Updates” to bring your system to a current state.

Setting up your apps / personalization

Let’s get our hands dirty! Inside the package store where you just updated your system, enter e.g. “Steam”, then hit the download / install button and on the bottom of the window click apply. It will ask you some questions regarding optional dependencies, you can ignore those, or if you are aware of your system specs and requirements you can choose some of those optional dependencies. This is how you’ll install most stuff in a practical manner.

If something isn’t available inside the normal package store, fear not. Since you’re on arch you have access to this amazing thing called the Arch User Repository (short AUR). Normally you’d have to build such packages yourself that are available in the AUR but thanks to a AUR helper called “yay” it’s easier than ever.

To install yay - which allows you to easily install stuff from the AUR just open your terminal (Konsole) and do: sudo pacman -S yay

Wait for it to finish installing. Then we can for example install something like visual studio code by doing: yay -Syu visual-studio-code-bin

Read the instructions carefully, it will show you which packages are available, and you can select them by giving numbers or pressing “A” - for all - and then “Enter”. When it asks you if you want to view the “diffs” just press “N” and then “Enter”. In case you should’ve accidentally entered something else and you are stuck in a different screen, press “q” to exit.

That’s the most important things really. If you want to personalize your system you can do so under settings, there you can browse the themes store and choose alot of different customization options.

FAQ

Manjaro has it’s hickups, and you may have run into an issue or two (I encountered the same ones!), so here’s a short FAQ how to handle issues and in case you were wondering how to get some simple things done. I suggest going through these top to bottom.

NVIDIA Graphics drivers gone (after installing Steam)

Your display may have low resolution and only one of your screens seems to be working. This is an issue my boyfriend and I both encountered when installing Steam. To fix it, do the following steps:

1. Open Konsole (your terminal of choice)
2. Enter the following: sudo mhwd -i pci video-nvidia
3. Reboot your system

This will reinstall the latest propietary drivers for your NVIDIA GPU.

Using a better graphics platform (Wayland)

I’ve found that there’s multiple issues that have to do with the default Graphics Platform. X11 is very outdated and doesn’t work too well with wine and games on newer systems. As an alternative would be “Wayland”. Install it using by going into the package manager. It should download all the remaining dependencies aswell.

If you have a AMD GPU then that’s it. You can restart your PC and then on the login screen there should be an option somewhere to select Wayland instead of X11.

If you have a NVIDIA GPU on the other hand, then we need to do some linux magic, because for whatever reason it’s not standard yet and linux devs hate NVIDIA.

Open Konsole (or your terminal of choice) and run the following:

Go into the root User sudo -i

Create a new modprobe file touch /etc/modprobe.d/nvidia.conf

Use your text editor of choice, e.g. nano nano /etc/modprobe.d/nvidia.conf

Add these two lines

1
2

options nvidia_drm modeset=1
options nvidia_drm fbdev=1

Restart your system, and select the option for Wayland. If it worked, it should offer you a way smoother linux experience and spare you from lots of issues that would arise from using X11.

Running Windows Games / Software / Game launchers

You have several options, pick whatever you like really.

Game launchers:

• Heroic Launcher for GOG, Epic Games, Amazon Games
• Lutris for GOG, Epic Games, EA Play, Ubisoft Connect
• Installing these launchers via wine directly is also an option

If possible, you can run the games mostly directly via wine and they should run fine. Otherwise try to add the .exe’s to your Steam libary as a non-steam game, go to compatability and select Proton Experimental (or something). These Launchers can be found in the package store. These launchers also do already set-up wine and proton for you in a sandbox environment on a per-software basis.

Installing XBOX Controller drivers / Pairing

This is a tricky one, follow these steps:

1. Grab a Windows device / virtual machine and install the Xbox accessoires app
2. Connect your XBOX Controller via USB to said device / pass through the USB to the VM
3. When it shows up in the app, click the three dots and select update to update the Firmware
4. This process may take a couple minutes

After you did that, let’s go over to the Terminal (Konsole):

1. If you’re on the latest Manjaro version (as of writing) then you will need the up-to-date Kernel Headers. Install those with: yay -S linux69-headers
2. Let it do it’s thing, after that install the xpadneo drivers for XBOX controllers: yay -Syu xpadneo-dkms
3. Follow the instructions until it installed successfully.
4. Now pair your controller via bluetooth like normally and it should hopefully work. If not then please visit the documentation!

Torrenting very slow

This one is a very simple solution, I thought at first it was because of my VPN and Linux being funky, but it was a network card setting:

1. Go to your Networking Settings
2. Select your wired or wireless connection
3. In the tab “wired/wireless” there’s an option “link negotiation”, set this to automatic.
4. Restart your system and try torrenting again :)

I will be adding to this guide as I encounter issues and discover more relevant stuff. If you have any suggestions yourself, feel free to send me an email: [email protected]