The first hour with Manjaro 26

manjaro 26 / published / guide #5 / ≈ 2 min read

Manjaro hides a lot of Arch under a friendly graphical installer. You boot, click through some questions, and you're on a working desktop in twenty minutes. But there's a short list of things worth doing before you treat the system as "ready."

What is Manjaro? Manjaro is based on Arch Linux. Arch is famously powerful but unfriendly to set up; Manjaro keeps the same package universe and adds a sane installer, sensible defaults, and a couple of graphical tools so you don't have to live in a terminal.

Step 1: Pick the fastest download mirrors

A "mirror" is a server that hosts copies of all the packages. There are dozens around the world; using a slow one makes every update painful.

sudo pacman-mirrors --fasttrack 5

This picks the 5 fastest mirrors for you. It takes a few seconds — let it finish.

Step 2: Refresh and update everything

sudo pacman -Syyu

Don't panic at the letter soup. pacman is Arch/Manjaro's package manager. The flags mean:

  • -S — sync (install/update)
  • -yy — force a fresh download of the package list (the double-y matters after you changed mirrors)
  • -u — upgrade everything

If it asks for confirmation, type y. The first update after install can take a while.

Step 3: Install some essentials

sudo pacman -S base-devel git curl tmux htop neovim
  • base-devel — compilers and build tools (you'll need these for the AUR later).
  • git, curl, tmux, htop, neovim — the usual companions.

Step 4: Turn on the AUR and Flatpak in pamac

pamac is Manjaro's graphical software manager — the "Add/Remove Software" icon. Two big sources of software are switched off by default:

  • The AUR (Arch User Repository) — recipes built by the community, often more software than the official repos.
  • Flatpak — sandboxed apps that work across distros.

Open Add/Remove Software, click the three-dots menu, choose Preferences, then the Third Party tab. Toggle on AUR and Flatpak. Type your password when asked.

Step 5: Take a snapshot

Manjaro installs on Btrfs by default, which means you can take instant "snapshots" of the filesystem — like a save game you can restore from. Use Timeshift:

sudo pacman -S timeshift
sudo timeshift --create --comments "fresh install"

Now if a future update breaks something, you can roll back to this point.

Step 6: Look at your hardware

mhwd --listinstalled        # what drivers are loaded
mhwd-kernel --list          # available kernels (more on this in another guide)

mhwd stands for Manjaro Hardware Detection. It manages drivers, especially the proprietary NVIDIA driver. Use this, not pacman -S nvidia directly — it sorts out the related bits for you.

That's the first hour. The system is now updated, snapshot-protected, and ready for whatever you want to do with it.

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