My Manjaro setup in 2024

After a fail attempt to upgrade my Hackintosh to latest Sonoma, I decided to give Manjaro a try. And see my self how long I can stick with that as a daily system. The one single fact I choose Manjaro over other distros is the AUR which makes finding and installing software like a breeze.

Install essential packages

First thing first, every Manjaro user must have yay.

sudo pacman -S yay base-devel

By default, when makepkg builds an AUR package, compression is enabled. After building, the package needs to be decompressed again for installation. This is unnecessary (and slow for large packages) if it’s only for personal use on one’s own machine. To set up package building without compression:

sudo sed -i "s/PKGEXT='.pkg.tar.xz'/PKGEXT='.pkg.tar'/g" /etc/makepkg.conf

Install my daily applications, your mileage may vary.

yay -S google-chrome visual-studio-code-bin 1password notion-app-electron notion-calendar-electron figma-linux feishu-bin zoom spotify thunderbird-beta-bin git-extras

And I use Wrap as my terminal, which was so nice they recently add support for Linux.

Switch to zsh and install oh-my-zsh:

chsh -s /bin/zsh

sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh/master/tools/install.sh)"

Fcitx5 with RIME

sudo pacman -S fcitx5 fcitx5-qt fcitx5-gtk fcitx5-chinese-addons fcitx5-configtool fcitx5-rime

Add following into /etc/environment:

GTK_IM_MODULE=fcitx
QT_IM_MODULE=fcitx
XMODIFIERS=@im=fcitx
SDK_IM_MODULE=fcitx
GLFW_IM_MODULE=ibus

You can double check if the environment variables are set correctly by running export|grep -E "IM|XMODIFIERS" .

Add Rime as input method in fcitx5-configtool.

Clone the repo to configure Rime to use WuSong Pinyin (雾凇拼音):

git clone https://github.com/iDvel/rime-ice.git

cp -r rime-ice/*  ~/.local/share/fcitx5/rime

And use some nicer theme:

yay -S fcitx5-skin-fluentdark-git

And set the theme in Input Method > Configure addons > Classic User Interface > Theme.

Development environment

Install nvm and Node.js LTS:

yay -S nvm

nvm install --lts

Install pnpm and yarn:

yay -S yarn-pnpm-corepack

corepack prepare --activate yarn@1 pnpm@latest

Small tweaks

If you are using HiDPI, Zoom might not scale properly. You can fix it by setting ScaleFactor=2 in ~/.config/zoomus.config.
Uncheck Settings > Power Management > Energy Savings > Dim screen to prevent screen dimming when you are back from idle.
I am using a couple of Logitech devices, Solaar is a must-have device manager.

Know issues

My set up is two monitors all with DP, there is a known issue that the primary monitor will not wake up after sleep. I have to unplug and plug it back to make it work.