Wow, it seems silly to write about the operating system one uses, but I have been so impressed with how fast, easy to use Manjaro Linux (KDE Plasma) has been to use. My journey started with quite a bit of frustration, simply trying to get past UEFI and Secure Boot on a laptop while keeping dual boot Windows 11. Yeah, yeah, there are tougher problems.

Now that I’ve had some time to settle into Manjaro Linux, I’ve found myself customizing it with a variety of apps, such as:

• Vivaldi browser
• Secure Space Encryptor (SSE)
• Mullvad VPN and browser
• Signal
• Zoom
• vokoscreenNG for screen recording (wow, works great letting me select portion of my screen, etc.)
• Peek for animated GIF creation
• OnlyOffice
• OpenShot Video Editor

To be honest, that list of software really handles things well for me. I’ve been totally pleased with vokoscreenNG, which I used quite extensively to record some videos on my screen. It works even better than OBS (which, admittedly, is overkill for many of the things I do). The built in app like Kwrite text editor, Spectacle screen capture utility that makes annotation a breeze have been pleasant surprises.

The only types of “trouble” I ran into were when I couldn’t get my webcam to show up on Zoom. The camera light would turn on, appeared in Cheese, but nothing. I immediately ran over to Perplexity and it was able to give me a few tweaks that solved the problem. That’s been true in other ways that might have stumped me in the past, but now are easily overcome with AI support. Even installing javajdk for SSE was simple, but I remember what a pain it was in other distros.

What does post boil down to? I’m using Manjaro Linux on my old laptop (it feels like new!) when I’ve always used a Debian/Ubuntu-based distro before. The whole KDE Plasma has been wonderful, too, and installing software quite easy.

On the Go

For fun, I installed Manjaro Linux on a 2TB portable USB drive. It works quite well on machines with USB-3/SuperSpeed port. It’s slow as molasses on anything else. But that does give me the option to run everything (only a slight lag) from a portable USB. This is much better than me trying to load it on a machine where I’d have to reimage everything, reload Windows from scratch, etc.