It’s half baked: like the post says, it’s the first testing version. It will be developed more, like a member of the team said:
Our plan is definitely for it to become an official variant of Manjaro. With the community testing version we’re now gathering some feedback on what people expect from such a variant and what should still go in there or what could be slimmed down.
It kinda feels like it goes against what Manjaro was supposed to be though. A safer version of Arch but with about the same features, including its massive software pool to pull from - and that exactly is what would fall flat in this case, since you’d need very selectively maintained “packages”, which would be extremely limited in comparison to someone with access to regular repos and the AUR.
I don’t know how Manjaro plans to do it, but Universal Blue distros have access to the entire set of dnf repositories, including non-free packages. You run rpm-ostree install, and it layers the package you want. Each system update re-layers the custom package layer after upgrading the system layer.
But since this is pre-alphaware, it’s kind of early to be passing judgement on how/if they’ll have access to the AUR and whether you could layer packages. Seems like the “safety” aspect is served through having an immutable system, which ensures end users have the same base as everyone else.
And it’s fine if that’s not your cup of tea. Sounds like it’s not. Arch, openSUSE, Debian, and their mutable descendants aren’t going anywhere.
I don’t know for the AUR, but the regular repos seem to be already accessible. You can try them with pacman, but the installed packages will be deleted at the moment of the update, or you can create a custom image and add the wanted packages which will be reinstalled at every update.
It’s half baked: like the post says, it’s the first testing version. It will be developed more, like a member of the team said:
It’s clearly not ready.
It kinda feels like it goes against what Manjaro was supposed to be though. A safer version of Arch but with about the same features, including its massive software pool to pull from - and that exactly is what would fall flat in this case, since you’d need very selectively maintained “packages”, which would be extremely limited in comparison to someone with access to regular repos and the AUR.
I don’t know how Manjaro plans to do it, but Universal Blue distros have access to the entire set of
dnfrepositories, including non-free packages. You runrpm-ostree install, and it layers the package you want. Each system update re-layers the custom package layer after upgrading the system layer.But since this is pre-alphaware, it’s kind of early to be passing judgement on how/if they’ll have access to the AUR and whether you could layer packages. Seems like the “safety” aspect is served through having an immutable system, which ensures end users have the same base as everyone else.
And it’s fine if that’s not your cup of tea. Sounds like it’s not. Arch, openSUSE, Debian, and their mutable descendants aren’t going anywhere.
I don’t know for the AUR, but the regular repos seem to be already accessible. You can try them with pacman, but the installed packages will be deleted at the moment of the update, or you can create a custom image and add the wanted packages which will be reinstalled at every update.