[manjaro-dev] Fwd: Manjaro vs Arch

[Rob McCathie]

I haven't read his article yet, but in response to just the bullet points
made in his email:

>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.



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.
Also I don't think it's at all accurate to refer to Manjaro as a "walled
garden", it utterly isn't.

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.

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".


>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?

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.


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.

Regards,
Rob.



On Sun, Dec 8, 2013 at 8:47 PM, Philip Müller <philm at manjaro.org> wrote:

>  Hmm, I got an interesting e-mail today in my inbox.
> What do you think?
>
> greez
>
> Phil
>
> -------- Original Message --------  Subject: Manjaro vs Arch  Date: Sat,
> 7 Dec 2013 22:38:59 -0500  From: Keith Curtis <keithcu at gmail.com><keithcu at gmail.com>  To:
> philm at manjaro.org
>
> 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:http://keithcu.com/wordpress/?p=3389
>
> Great job! Please focus.
>
> What do you think?
>
> -Keith
>
>
>
>
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>
>
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