Available on Amazon

This is the first of the free articles directly taken from the Manjaro Linux User Guide book, available at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C4PSWRQS/. The full list of freely available articles is here: Manjaro Linux User Guide – For newbies, fans, and mid users.

Read time: 2 minutes. Next article: 1.2 About Arch Linux and Manjaro.

Book structure and contents

The purpose of this book is to present most of the magnificent features of Manjaro and most modern Linux distributions in an easy and fast way for all users – beginners and intermediate/advanced. If you are a Windows user, a beginner, or a newbie of any kind, this book is for you. If you are an intermediate or advanced user, you will find most of the topics engaging and with up-to-date information. This book can also serve as a basic Manjaro/Linux reference guide for the presented common topics.

There are Terminal fans, mouse fans, and people who think one or the other is good/bad/unknown, and so on. Historically, the Terminal with commands was the tool of choice for any features and settings set up for Linux. As Linux keeps pace with developments, we have hundreds of nice graphical tools to make our lives easier. So, for newbies and people looking for graphical menus, all important basic settings with a Graphical User Interface (GUI) will be presented with screenshots in the first two parts of the book.

I provide an excellent Terminal primer in Chapter 7. After that, the rest of the chapters are primarily Terminal-based. As such, they will include the necessary commands with relevant parameters. For a beginner, this means you will have an easy learn-by-example approach; for the advanced user, this book will be a reference guide.

To justify for beginners the usage of the Terminal in the age of GUI, many advanced or regular features are faster and easily controlled via the Terminal; some are even still available only via the Terminal. Such features are easy to handle with hints and guides like this book. Therefore, to become an advanced user, you must learn Terminal commands, which will all be well explained and with examples.

If you are a beginner, rest assured that all the advanced features will be explained in detail, sometimes with a bit of history. This is also helpful for advanced users, as the history often explains why a given function works or is designed in a certain way.

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Short parts description

Part 1 covers installation and GUI characteristics. Some chapters contain separate parts dedicated to beginners or advanced users. It ends with a detailed overview of online resources, forums, and updates. 

Part 2 starts with GUI SW installation. It then covers all general classes of user applications (office tools, browsers, audio, messaging, text, games, etc.), with recommendations for the best and some test results. It ends with the great Terminal primer as a first step toward advanced features.

Part 3 is a deeper dive into Manjaro and Linux’s design, starting with package management, dependencies, and environment variables. It then investigates the Linux filesystem basics, structure and types, and continues the journey with storage, mounting, encryption, and backups. Its last part is a detailed explanation of networking fundamentals, file sharing, SSH, network security and firewalls, and VPNs.

Part 4 is dedicated to advanced topics, starting with service management with systemd, processes, system logs, and user management. It then switches to system maintenance, troubleshooting, and reinstallation. We then explore shell scripts and automation, and end with Linux kernel basics and switching.

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Versions

This book is based on Manjaro versions from 21.3.0 Ruah to 23.0.1 Uranos, updated until September 2023. As some of the installation-related and presented SW screenshots are from versions 21 and 22, versions from 24 on might have slightly different graphical designs without main feature changes.

Generally, a rolling release distribution like Manjaro significantly differs in basic features after at least two years. In newer versions, most of the time, the old features remain, bug fixes are added, additional functionalities are sometimes introduced, and the GUI changes slowly. Thus, this book will be completely relevant at least until the end of 2025.

Regarding the parts related to general topics such as filesystems, systemd, and others – in the Linux world, once established, they rarely change. Some of them had their design fixed between 1990 and 2010 and haven’t changed since then. Others have their roots in Unix, based on designs before 1990. In addition, new tools are mostly backward-compatible – the user can work with them flawlessly. I also try to mention new additions from the last three years when they are available. As a result, 80% of the book will be relevant at least until the end of 2027. I state this based on my 14 years of Linux experience and extensive usage of four distributions before Manjaro.

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A polite request

Please be merciful to me, as I can’t cover all possible facts, commands, options, screenshots, and so on in a book of this size. In addition, structuring all the information is difficult as Linux is an infinite universe.

I will do my best to cover all the important points on each topic, but for particular details, you might need to do additional research.

Lastly, if you like my approach and find this book valuable, I would appreciate it if you left a review on the platform you purchased it from.

So now, shall we begin?

Next article: 1.2 About Arch Linux and Manjaro.

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All rights reserved. Parts of this free content are allowed to be cited only when the official link to this article is provided as a source of the information, the author’s name is mentioned, as well as the publisher and the book name. Example: “Cited from the article <insert_link> by Atanas Georgiev Rusev, as part of the Manjaro Linux User Guide book, by PACKT publishing. All rights reserved”.