Pi Land Adventure 2 – Manjaro Mate

The next pit stop in the Pi land journey is the Manjaro Mate ARM version which I downloaded from here and flashed onto the micro SD card using Etcher. The Manjaro Mate arm image for Raspberry Pi is 923MB. Flashing it to the micro SD card is super easy and flawless with Etcher. Once flashed, just pop that card into the pi and you are good to go.

Upon first boot, Manjaro greets with the Calamares installer which asks for user setup information and sets up other configurations for WiFi, timezone, keyboard settings etc. The setup is quick and painless. It took me just 2 mins and after a reboot I was on the Manjaro Mate desktop. The RAM usage hovered just over 780MB which is impressive. And the complete install took less then 5GB disk space.

First impressions of the Manjaro Mate desktop were really good. It feels more polished and well put together than Ubuntu Mate. The default dark theme works for me and I don’t feel the need to tweak it. No issues when connecting to my WiFi network.

The next I checked was the list of installed applications. I find this list is minimally curated. It has Firefox for internet browsing, Audacious for music and mpv for video file playback but that’s it. No photo editor like Gimp or even the Libre Office suite. Although it is not a deal breaker, I would have loved to have these installed by default. I guess these are left out to keep the install image size manageable. Media playback is flawless. Audacious does its job well when playing different audio formats. No complaints about mpv either. YouTube also works well. No lag or buffering was noticed. Bluetooth connection was not an issue but I did face some lag when listening to music via Bluetooth. Will have to check if this is a persistent issue.

Manjaro Mate doesn’t have a app launcher. So I went ahead and installed Synapse using the pacman cli. pacman is quick and simple for application installs, system updates and upgrades. I was able to upgrade the OS and find and install Gimp. All via simple cli commands using pacman. Though there is a UI to add/remove software, using pacman is simple enough and just works. I am more used to using apt-get but using pacman is just a small learning curve.

Here are some screenshots for the quick changes that I made to Manjaro post install.

• 

• 

• 

• 

I think I am getting the hang of things quickly here and find the Manjaro Mate usage even better than Ubuntu Mate. It is less resource hungry, feels more polished, has easy access to new software and in general just works. I don’t have to worry about the system being out of date or upgrades that fail. I will eventually have to curate my own list of software which are more suited to my daily needs, should I decide to stick with Manjaro Mate.

This has been a fun pit stop. Let me spend some more time with this before I move on to exploring Pop OS. The way I see it, Manjaro Mate is winning over Ubuntu Mate by a good deal and its showdown with Pop OS will be interesting to see.

Pi Land Adventure 1 – Ubuntu Mate

Ubuntu Mate is the first pitstop on this journey into Pi Land. Getting hold of the raspberry image from the website is straight forward. It is a 1.9 GB image which can be flashed onto the SD card using Etcher. Etcher has become my go to tool to flash any OS images onto pen drives or now even sd cards. The SD card in question is a SanDisk 64 GB class 10 card. I plan to keep flashing this for further test runs. Flashing the image and then verifying it does take some time but I let that be. A hasty move of skipping the verification messed up the sd card and it would not boot on my pi. Lession learnt.

Once the sd card is flashed correctly, just slide it into the Raspberry Pi and let it boot into the setup screen. It asked for user details, location, wifi etc as it continued the setup. My only complaint was that it took too long to configure the hardware. On one hand its familiarity is helpful, but then for an arm device, the configuration and setup should not really take that long. After it was done it landed on the familiar Mate desktop. I was already feeling at home.

At idle, Ubuntu Mate for RPi used about 1 GB of the 8 GB ram available, which later crept up to 1.8 GB as I started using more applications. The OS took 7GB space on the available 59GB sd card. This is leaves reasonable space for user files and additioanl software installation.

I started looking around and checking the preinstalled apps. Mate does not dissapoint in this aspect. It has sensible defaults with Firefox, Libre Office, Rhythmbox and video player. Having a full office suite is a great plus. I could not find GIMP installed and also would have liked VLC instead of the default audio/video players. But that is a personal choice.

For multimedia support, I could take Youtube for a spin and also play some sample mp3 and mp4 files. Everything was smooth. Playback over bluetooth also worked without any hiccups. Audio playback via HDMI output was a pleasant surprise., which means I could also play audio via my monitor speakers. No need to always have a bluetooth device connected to the Pi.

Appearance wise, I cannot complain about Ubuntu Mate. It’s dark themes with accent colors are comfortable to work with. I made a few changes to the themes, set a different background image and was happy with the defaults provided. I really need not go theme hunting to make this desktop look any better. I could work with what I saw.

• 

• 

• 

Software installation is also very easy using Mate’s Software Boutique. All the familiar apps are available for download and install. I tried to install and use Gimp just to get a feel of it. I will have to work on a curated list of softwares once I settle down on the correct OS for my pi. For now just testing ease of finding and installing new software was good enough for me.

Now is the time for the verdict. The first pitstop has been welcoming and I find the Ubuntu Mate for Raspberry Pi perfectly usable. It certainly feels that the 8GB pi with 4 CPUs is more than capable of running the operating system and has the potential to become a daily driver. This ofcourse is subject to how much of daily computing tasks it can carry on its shoulders. For this test run, I haven’t been pushing it. But once I decide on which OS to use and which softwares the keep, I am sure the Pi will keep its promise.

I plan to move on to the others on the list. For now Ubuntu Mate is a strong contender unless Manjaro or Pop OS! toss it out the window.

Venturing into Pi land

For some time I wanted to get my hands on the Raspberry pi and tinker with this credit-card-sized, single-board computer for its capabilities and evaluate its potential for being a Linux daily driver. It would be fun to have such a small form factor, yet powerful enough to have up to 8GB ram and a dual HDMI display. I knew I would buy one soon and start playing with it.

The only issue I could not foresee was how hard these tiny computers were to come by. Various factors have led to a dearth of Raspberry Pis in the market. Several online retailers were listing these as “Sold Out”, with very little information on how soon they could be re-stocked. The seconds market was also rife with insanely jacked prices. I decided to wait until something was available again, rather than spending a fortune on a used pi.

After keeping track of purchase kits online, I finally found the one I wanted. I didn’t waste another minute and ordered it right away. Soon enough, I got my hands on the Raspberry Pi 4 with 8 GB ram, with a starter kit that had all the bells and whistles like the 128GB SD card, power adapter with on-off switch, HDMI cables, and an aluminum case which was passively cooled. Unboxing the package and assembling it all together was a breeze.

Just connect it to a display, keyboard, and mouse and you are good to go. The SD card that came with the kit was preinstalled with NOOBS and I followed the instructions to install 64-bit Raspberry Pi OS in a short time. I played around with the OS and quickly realized that though it is optimized for the Rpi, it is not the most visually appealing. In fact, the interface really feels outdated. I spent some time trying to look around and checking different software that the OS had to offer. There was no visible lag on the 8GB model and I was comfortable using it for a while.

It was soon obvious that the UI was not as polished as some other Rpi OSes out there and so I started looking at some of the popular ones which I could take for a spin. I have cornered down Ubuntu Mate, Manjaro, and POP OS as potential candidates for installation on my Raspberry Pi. I can see myself writing another blog that would be a showdown of these three operating systems and which one can I eventually settle for as a daily driver.

More on that later. Another blog will soon follow. For now, I find myself in Pi land and can certainly see myself hopping around for exciting stuff to do on my new Pi.