<div dir="ltr"><div><div><div><div>I haven't read his article yet, but in response to just the bullet points made in his email:<br><br><pre>>1. Enable Manjaro setup to run out of the Arch repositories so people aren't locked in to your walled garden.
>2. Cancel your wiki and encourage those fresh faces to further improve the Arch one and discourage learned helplessness.
>3. Call yourself Arch so that you get better combined numbers on distrowatch, and more news articles. Any name is fine.</pre><br><br></div>1. The clear disadvantage to operating as just a repo listed above the official Arch ones in pacman.conf (like how Archbang and a few others do) is that the concept of preventing or at least reducing the amount of manual intervention required by users during updates goes out the window. Manjaro either wants to offer this or it doesn't, if it doesn't, then he's right, but my understanding is it does.<br>
</div><div>Also I don't think it's at all accurate to refer to Manjaro as a "walled garden", it utterly isn't.<br></div><div><br></div>2. This should be considered carefully. I basically agree with him that any information that can be universally applied to both Arch and Manjaro (which is like 98% of everything) should probably be going on the Arch wiki. It's illogical and inefficient to split the information across 2 wikis when the entire purpose of a wiki is to be a publicly created information source.<br>
<br></div>3. I simply disagree here. Too much brand recognition and goodwill has already come "Manjaro's" way. Even if Manjaro were just a repo to be run in conjunction with the official Arch repos, I'd still see it as advantageous to keep the Manjaro name. Plus so long as Manjaro does a good job of catering to it's target user, i don't see that it does Arch any damage 9if anything, only benefit). Even if it didn't do a good job, Arch(ers) can just laugh and be like "yeah well, run Arch, not some fork/repo/whatever".<br>
<br><br><pre>>One of the benefits of the above is that you will run your efforts more efficiently, so you will have more time to work on the important problems rather than all the grunt work of creating a full distro and a new brand, dealing with security bugs, keeping up with the flood of packages, needing to manage mirrors wikis, forums, etc. Do you want to make a new brand, or do you want to help Arch kick ass? Also, how much are you giving back to Arch right now?</pre>
I think he doesn't understand the where the boundaries of Manjaro's target audience frontier are, or what's required to satisfy them. Though, sometimes I think I don't exactly understand those boundaries either.<br>
<br><br></div><div>PS. Please excuse my email formatting if it's shotty. When I initially installed Manjaro I decided I wanted to re-evaluate my email client choices and just have never got around to it, been using webmail interfaces, they're generally not awesome.<br>
</div><div><br></div><div>Regards,<br>Rob.<br></div><br><div class="gmail_extra"><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Sun, Dec 8, 2013 at 8:47 PM, Philip Müller <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:philm@manjaro.org" target="_blank">philm@manjaro.org</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">
<div text="#000000" bgcolor="#FFFFFF">
Hmm, I got an interesting e-mail today in my inbox.<br>
What do you think?<br>
<br>
greez<br>
<br>
Phil<br>
<div><br>
-------- Original Message --------
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<td>Manjaro vs Arch</td>
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<td>Sat, 7 Dec 2013 22:38:59 -0500</td>
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<th align="RIGHT" nowrap valign="BASELINE">From: </th>
<td>Keith Curtis <a href="mailto:keithcu@gmail.com" target="_blank"><keithcu@gmail.com></a></td>
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<th align="RIGHT" nowrap valign="BASELINE">To: </th>
<td><a href="mailto:philm@manjaro.org" target="_blank">philm@manjaro.org</a></td>
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<pre>Hi;
Manjaro is an interesting project. Adding a simpler first step into
the Arch world is an extremely valuable idea.
However, I have some suggestions:
1. Enable Manjaro setup to run out of the Arch repositories so people
aren't locked in to your walled garden.
2. Cancel your wiki and encourage those fresh faces to further improve
the Arch one and discourage learned helplessness.
3. Call yourself Arch so that you get better combined numbers on
distrowatch, and more news articles. Any name is fine.
I can understand that you might not want to consider anything so
radical. You've probably come to love the name Manjaro, and are
excited by the recent success and new users, etc.
However, in general, it is best if people specialize. I'd love a
pretty (HiDPI) installer that did all the right things for me
including following the best practices from the wiki, setting up
Plymouth, etc. That problem is plenty big for a team of your size. I
can think of many ways Arch could have a better out of box experience
but it can entirely be done from a custom ISO from the standard
repositories and one extra. That gives you plenty of flexibility for
innovation, yet runs things more stream-lined for you.
One of the benefits of the above is that you will run your efforts
more efficiently, so you will have more time to work on the important
problems rather than all the grunt work of creating a full distro and
a new brand, dealing with security bugs, keeping up with the flood of
packages, needing to manage mirrors wikis, forums, etc. Do you want to
make a new brand, or do you want to help Arch kick ass? Also, how much
are you giving back to Arch right now?
Here is an article I wrote that discusses these ideas in more detail:
<a href="http://keithcu.com/wordpress/?p=3389" target="_blank">http://keithcu.com/wordpress/?p=3389</a>
Great job! Please focus.
What do you think?
-Keith
</pre>
<br>
</div>
<br>
</div>
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<br></blockquote></div><br></div></div>