TROMJaro - An Amazing XFCE Distro!

[@TheLinuxCast]

This video was released early for Tier 2 and above patrons! I also release a weekly patron exclusive podcast for all levels. Check it out patreon.com/thelinuxcast

[@brennenraines51]

Manjaro XFCE drove me nuts. Its firefox engine works so sporadically that half of all searches wouldnt even load, i thought it was my wifi card but i switched to ANY other distro and it worked, Pop os, Bodhi, are the ones i tried.

[@themroc8231]

Smplayer is a graphical front-end for mpv and mplayer that adds a lot of options through point-and-click menus and comes with all the codecs you'll need out of the box. It's really good, and if you come from something like VLC it's a pretty smooth transition. I think MPV looks better and cleaner in a WM, but it's the best option to put in a XFCE distribution IMO.

[@gfjffdgjroedsfdkdslmerrelb4357]

anyone want to learn bash scripting with me through co operation

[@tambuchalinux]

Manjaro has been quite decent for me lately. Especially if you choose btrfs as the filesystem, it adds btrfs-tools automatically with snapshots in the grub menu.

[@TheRajeshphadke]

One of the very good (method of) reviews. Thank you!

[@JakeLinux]

You beat me to it, I had this all loaded up and ready to go before my machine gave up the ghost. Now I have to remake it and you have just covered it, so I guess I'll pass on it now. Thanks a lot🤣

[@TheLinuxCast]

Sorry, Jake. 😂

[@SwiatLinuksa]

7:08 that's fork or something taken from ZorinOs Lite which base too on XFCE.

[@tiotrom7023]

It actually is built by us from scratch.

[@jesse7631]

Great video Matt! I have to say, I love the font they're using.

[@omega3fatass61]

it looks really really good imo.

[@user-gx3cf2ot2q]

i just found out and looked into this a few days ago. what a coincidence. lol.. i must be moving up to a new level of linux nerd.

[@TActually]

Bro... watched your video with lofi Hip Hop playing in the background. It was glorious. especially during the B-role of the installation. OK, serious part of the comment: I dig the customization of XFCE OOB, but my experience with trade-free and libre kernels has not been great(custom AMD desktop and Dell Laptop) so I will admire this distro from afar.

[@raulcatacoragrundy5334]

Can you do a review of Garuda ? that would be great and keep with the great reviews and thoughts on every distro

[@jobbingtoaster1502]

Nice review, Matt. Although I think it looks good, I have some reservations in regards to using Manjaro. It's just too chaotic for me. I wonder if another distribution will be able to steal Manjaro's title of "Arch, but stable".

[@Anthropomorphic]

I've seen Void and Tumbleweed be referred to as such. Distrobox also seems to make the AUR less of a deal breaker for a lot of people. Then there's Nix.

[@jobbingtoaster1502]

@@Anthropomorphic Hey, thanks. I actually forgot about Tumbleweed. It's pretty good from what I remember. I'll look into those other things you mentioned.

[@yogurtColombiano]

Maybe you would like endeavourOS, it's also arch based.

[@sharkuel]

I'd say both Arcolinux and RebornOS hold those tittles for me. Both have fairly complete Calamares installer where you can install the packages you want, and great implementations of timeshift out of the get-go, and the comunity behind those are awesome.

[@jobbingtoaster1502]

Thanks for those other suggestions. I've fiddled with Endeavour Os, but I've never really used it. I have a spare laptop lying around, so I'll try all those distros out on it.

[@thingsiplay]

The worst about the distro seems to be the name of it. Which is a pretty good compliment in my opinion.

[@ArniesTech]

Unfortunately yet another today-here-tomorrow-gone distro. The 4th question should be "What does it bring to the table that the other 5000 distros didnt do yet?"

[@Videobe]

Did you try it? On first look I have so far noticed: - Working full theme support for apps from all the standard sources (GTK, QT, Flatpak, AppImage?) - Easy to use layout switcher for beginners, but also the XFCE panel profiles config application setup out of the box with a nice selection of different starting points already in place. I haven't noticed this in any other XFCE implementation. - A well chosen set of default apps without being bloated (very subjective, but I certainly agree with many of their choices). - I can install most of the programs I want (pretty much all of the native Linux ones I think) straight from the very beginner friendly package manager without having to go hunting around on the internet. Every other distro I have has compared very poorly in this regard. How can you call something easy to use or beginner friendly if you can't even install something as basic as your favourite browser without the terminal? I guess this aspect might have been a significant motivation for basing it on Manjaro. - Highly polished and consistent visual aesthetic with a massive range of matching custom icons, and a beautiful set of wallpapers that tie it all together. - A solid philosophy motivating the whole project from people who clearly have their hearts in the right place. If you know any other distro that ticks all those boxes I would be very interested to hear about it. I was also sceptical initially since I am somewhat biased against Manjaro, and the bus factor here is certainly a concern, but having been gravitating more and more towards XFCE I decided to give it a look and very glad I did. For me it is a unique combination of easy to use and powerful, and really feels a step up by comparison to say MX Linux, Zorin Lite, or Mint XFCE (which all have their good points too). I haven't been testing it long enough to make a final conclusion, but I would certainly say it is worth a look at least. It is the first one that really gave me that friendly feeling of being "at home".

[@shaunsnow5127]

​@@Videobei agree with your posts. do you (still) use it? im not a big fan of hopping, but i feel like i should give this a try

[@Videobe]

@@shaunsnow5127 Yes, it is still my favourite ditro by far. I have found that the low bus factor is not really a problem, as what you actually care about is how good support you get. And Tio is extremely helpful and quick to respond via either the TROMjaro forums or on their Matrix channel. While for anything XFCE related, ToZ on their forums is equally super fast and very helpful. So you get better support in practice than what you get from most larger organisations. I love how you can fully customise and style every aspect of XFCE exactly to your own preference. The only real downsides I have found are: 1. If you have a high DPI display, and apply display scaling, then out of the box not everything is scaled as consistently as in MX Linux (it is a shortcoming inherited from Manjaro and common to many distros). But this is easily fixed yourself (see forum post on it), and will probably be fixed for all new releases soon. 2. A very personal/subjective one but I am not a big fan of the rolling release model with so many regular updates to install. But at the same time, I very much rely on having the wide package availability from having all of the Manjaro repos, Chaotic AUR, AUR and Flatpak configured out of the box in the Pamac GUI. So I don't think there's any other distro that provides that, or with easier more granular control of updates. Maybe if I better learn how to work it all via CLI or going full Arch. I'm also thinking of trying the Nix package manager to have some better separation between app and system updates. Anyway, definitely worth checking out ☺

[@user24233]

enjoyed video

[@wyfyj]

I had to double take... Manjaro-based?! Ok.

[@clankfish]

lunacy lol

[@lqlarry]

Nice!

[@yomboprime]

Not related but, Fosstodon is down for several hours now.

[@fetB]

0:26 why?

[@TheLinuxCast]

Things in Manjaro break for me.

[@sprungles4tech]

By chance, you didn't install on the system. Right? Your 6 month challenge...also Gnome Videos is based on SMPlayer

[@TheLinuxCast]

I installed it on my laptop. Yes. The challenge is only on my main machine.

[@nandini3006]

To Say that you don't know SMPLAYER is BULL. I don't know in which world you live.

[@xperience-evolution]

I would install Tromjaro right away if it had Gnome. Unfortunatelly they droped it

[@wisnoskij]

I cannot see anyone using a 2 bar desktop. I have seen no bar desktops, I have seen side bar desktops, I have seen top and bottom bar desktops. And they all have thier place, but 2 bar desktops?

[@folksurvival]

"I cannot see anyone using a 2 bar desktop." Well the most popular distro is probably Ubuntu and they use the 2 bar set up in Gnome so probably most Linux users are using a 2 bar desktop.

[@bmmartin1684]

For such an innovative distro, it has a very poor name

[@terpiIa]

thirtysix