I’ve said it here and at the Manjaro community: The Manjaro Linux is an ugly duckling.
The default counter argument is that it is a subjective matter of taste, but that is just plain old BS. While Manjaro provides a excellent distribution from technological perspective, they are either blind or break decent design practices just for the fun of it.
But as this is Linux, everything is hackable and can be customized. I going to do just that in this thread, posting a series of articles on how to make Manjaro great again. Your tips and ideas are more than welcome too. We are going to be covering topic including, but not limited to:
- Icons
- Fonts
- Theme
- Wallpaper
- Panels…
And whatever comes along the way. Some of this stuff really is a matter of taste, but most of them are just common sense.
1. The initial state of Manjaro Xfce
I wanted to install something leading edge and rolling, without going full monty with Arch Linux, and right now Manjaro is the best bet. Their latest release is version 16.10.3. I chose Xfce desktop as I wanted something rather light weight and stable. I am running this with Linux kernel 4.8 and for the first time I am also trying out the Btrfs file system. And this is what they give you as the default.
- A flat 2D icon theme with pastel colors is mixed with slightly glossy faux-3D window manager theme. They worlds apart in terms of design language.
- On my 1440x900 screen the icons are also very small, and some hard to identify.
- The main icons are round, but if you go to Manjaro Settings Manager, you’ll find square and glossy icons instead.
- File system icon color (greenish) matches wall paper color. Folder icons on the desktop are barely visible.
- The terminal window is too transparent, seriously hurting readability.
- The wallpaper is too bright and not especially good looking.
- The contrast of dark grey and white is a bit too much in the menu.
These are the most obvious faults and the overall out-of-the-box experience makes my eyes bleed . What really ticks me off with Manjaro is that it really is a great distribution. It is almost heart breaking to see what kind of a first impression they deliver. The KDE version is slightly better, but the unofficial community spins of Gnome, MATE, etc. possibly even worse.
But it can be fixed. We’ll fix this. Stay tuned.
If you are not yet running Manjaro, the first thing to do is to get your copy from Manjaro.org and install it.