Manjaro Budgie
Good morning from Manjaro, where I overslept this morning, and didn't get up until a bit after 4:00. I guess this weather took more out of me than I realized. This will probably be the last message I write from Manjaro Budgie as part of my full-screen daily-driver test. I've spent longer with this one than I have with any others, and there's a reason for that. Normally I stop, sometimes after just a few hours, when something convinced me that I absolutely couldn't live with the distro I'm testing, and there's no point in going any farther with it.
That's not true of Manjaro Budgie, though. I was able to install everything I wanted to from its repositories. There was nothing wrong with its performance. It's currently on kernel 5.15.55-1. Although it enables 23 unit files at startup, and is just a bit slower than Solus at starting up and shutting down, it's the best of the other distros I've explored.
In terms of performance, I couldn't notice any difference between thr VM and the host for most activities. When creating the tab stacks from the Start Page bookmarks in Vivaldi, I noticed the same slowdown I'd seen with other distros as I got near the end of the job, but that's down to Vivaldi. This time I restarted the VM when that delay became noticeable, and I was back to the same performance as when I begain that task. Apparently the process wasn't being garbage-collected very well, and it was running out of memory. I'll mention that the next time I visit the Vivaldi forum.
On restart, the system displayed a notice -- as does Solus -- that there were upgrades available, so I used Pamac to install those. I never did figure out how to use Pacman from the command line. Displaying the help didn't really help me, because I still got an error after every attempt to install a package or do an update. I admit to not trying very hard to figure it out, though, becasue for my purposes Pamac was quite convenient a way to do those things, and I had other stuff I wanted to do.
All through this adventure I used Vivaldi Mail in place of Thunderbird, because it was one less piece of software to install and configure. But I did check to see whether Thunderbird version 102 was available in the repositories, and couldn't find it yet. Maybe I just didn't look for it correctly. Since it is available from the organization's web site, so I thought it might be available here, and I might have used it instead of Vivaldi Mail.
Altogether, it was a very successful trial. I corresponded with forums from here (as I still am doing), and like any other task done at human speed, I was unable to tell that I was working on a VM instead of its very fast host. That thanks goes mainly to VirtualBox, but Manjaro Budgie didn't do anything to make matters worse. I watched much of a motorcycle race that was streamed from the World Superbikes site, and there was no noticeable delay or slowness.
I connected to tv.youtube.com, which we use to stream content to our television, and watched a bit of the news on NewsMax. I played several episodes of each of the three solitaire games that I normally play on my laptop. In short, for the most part, using Manjaro Budgie wasn't a bad experience at all. If anything every happened to my beloved Solus, I could make do with this distribution in its place.
I'm going to take another snapshot of the VM now, and I think I'll keep Manjaro Budgie around for a while instead of removing it at this point, as I usually do. There are just a few things I'd like to expolore a bit farther (like how to use Pacman correctly) when I have time, and frankly, I want to return to using Thunderbird for email.
I started exploring other distros that caught my interest because I was intrigued by the forum thread about, "If Solus weren't available, what other distro would you use instead." For me, that distro certainly wouldn't be Windows. But without trying out the various Linux candidates, how could one ever answer that question with any confidence? Up to this point in my explorations, I'd have to say it would be Manjaro, although in all honesty I'd be more likely to install its KDE Plasma version than Budgie. Maybe that should be my next test -- comparing Manjaro Plasma to the Solus Plasma on my laptop.
