My suggestion to you, is please oh please replace Manjaro with EndeavourOS. It does everything Manjaro does but better. The learning curve will still be the same.

pacman: EndeavourOS has yay installed by default, which is an AUR helper. It interacts with pacman and builds your packages for you. yay -S steam for instance calls up pacman and builds the steam package from the repo and takes some of the head scratching out of it. Very easy to use. A simple “yay” to update, no sudo needed, yay will ask for a sudo password when it needs it.

Shell selection: bash is fine, and bash is enabled by default in EndeavourOS.

But the real reason to use EndeavourOS, aside from having an arch based rolling release distro, is its community and support. An amazing forum, tons of documentation between EOS and arch itself, and fantastic wiki that guides you through various tools and utilities you may want to use.

It is a terminal centric distro, but you can easily install GUI tools for things you don’t want to do in the CLI.

I would even be down to correspond and help you out if need be. Manjaro looks cool when you’re in those early stages of outgrowing Ubuntu, but it’s not the distro you’re looking for, I promise.

In general I’m not a fan of commenters immediately telling someone on Manjaro to leave Manjaro. But since you’re just transitioning to it, I have to agree, EndeavorOS is the way to go. Manjaro has some anti-patterns that create more trouble than they’re worth.

So… why don’t you transition to Debian and use it for the next 20 years? :)

I personally wouldn’t use Manjaro, especially if you plan to use anything from the AUR.

Manjaro is not a good Arch downstream afaik. What they try is like produce a stable Arch, like Debian Sid vs. Stable.

But if they do that, they need an automated QA path so that packages are put in based on how they work, and not just delay them by a few weeks all the time.

And hack my stuff like the AUR wouldnt be possible there, they would need to host such packages their own and make sure they work on that specific frozen release.

Its simply more work that what I know they invest. So stay away from Manjaro, use Arch, Opensuse TW, Fedora etc.

How does pacman work compared to apt-get ?

Roughly speaking, pacman is faster, but offers fewer functions. And the parameters take some time getting used to. For example, you can update the system with pacman -Syu.

and how to find in which package an command lies.

You can either use the command pacman -F or the tool pkgfile.

• https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/pacman
• https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Pacman/Rosetta
• https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/pkgfile

I am struggling a bit with Zsh, like I ended up starting bash to configure an environment variable, any ressources on-it.

Without a more detailed description of the problem, it is difficult to help you. As I have been using ZSH for many years (also under Arch), I can only say that you have done something wrong. But if you don’t want to work much with the shell anyway, Bash is perfectly adequate.

But do yourself a favour and stay away from Manjaro. The team responsible for this distribution has already made so many avoidable mistakes and strange decisions that I don’t trust this distribution. And I’m not alone in this opinion. If you want a distribution based on Arch, there are better alternatives. Like EndeavourOS, for example.

apt update && apt upgrade > pacman -Syu

apt install package > pacman -S package

apt remove package > pacman -Rns package

apt search package > pacman -Ss package

Except first dump Manjaro for EndeavourOS.

Once on EOS, dump pacman for yay ( sub yay in for pacman above ).

Yay will add access to the AUR ( WAY more packages )

As others have said, you can install Endeavour instead. If you want a gui installer, you can still install pamac (Manjaro’s gui for pacman and AUR).

I’m on Arch and I still find pamac useful at times.

The Arch Wiki is excellent. Endeavour has a great community that will help out if you get stuck.

There’s plenty of tutorial videos that can help get you started.

I highly recommend using the man command. Appending --help is also great for when you’re not quite sure what a pacman (or any other command for that matter) works.

If you are an experienced Linux user, just skip the Manjaro part. Either directly go for Arch or at least install something like EndeavourOS.

how to find in which package an command lies

It’s “pacman -Fx” but it can’t search in AUR packages.

Where did you find lsinput anyway? I don’t think input-utils is in AUR (either that or it’s called something completely different).

Step 1. Don’t.

pacman is less intuitive to use than apt, but after a while, you get used to it. I find it helpful to install tldr, which gives you samples for any command you pass to it. The main thing I like about it is the speed and how you can do an upgrade in a single short command (pacman -Syu), where as you need multiple in apt (apt update && apt upgrade.

When in doubt though, Arch Wiki is your goto.

How does pacman work compared to apt-get ? and how to find in which package an command lies. I struggled a bit to get lsinput (to configure a rudder pedal for flight sim)

Manjaro has Pamac installed out of the box. Its commands are much more readable:

Install: pamac install {software} Remove: pamac remove {software} Update: pamac update. You can just run man pamac and read that, it’s concise and self explanatory.

You can also use Pamac-gtk (the GUI app-store). I recommend the GTK4 version. Just run sudo pamac install pamac-gtk it will prompt you to replace pamac-gtk3.

You can enable the AUR by opening the GUI store (it will be called “add/remove software” in the app menu) > three dot menu > preferences (will prompt for password) > third party > Enable AUR support.

Only use the AUR as a last resort; check if the app is on flathub first, then the official repos, and finally check the AUR. You can add flatpak support by installing the flatpak package and the libpamac-flatpak-plugin optional dependency.

If you want updates to be as fast as they’d be on Arch you can switch to the unstable branch, and now you can’t blame Manjaro for your AUR problems.

and how to find in which package an command lies.

I am not sure what this means, but if you meant how to check what commands a package provides, then you can search for the package in the app-store and scroll down to “provides” everything under that section is commands the package provides.

I am struggling a bit with Zsh, like I ended up starting bash to configure an environment variable, any ressources on-it. Or shall I simply change my setting (and how) to use bash that I know a bit.

You can edit the ~/.zshrc file to add your aliases and permanent environment variables.

On Arch based distros you can also add environment variables in the /lib/environment.d file as KEY=value, for setting firefox to use Wayland for example.

If you want to switch from ZSH to BASH here’s how.

On your zsh query, check out Powerlevel 10K (p10k) and the fonts it recommends. It’s a suite/config package that makes zsh amazing.

A lot of people are telling you to not use manjaro and to use endeavour instead. I’ve been using manjaro for 6 years and it’s fine, in the end they offer very similar user experience.

For package management, I do everything with yay now. Just calling it on it’s own will update everything, with keywords it will search and ask you what to install. The only flag you have to know is -R to uninstall.

For the shell bash is perfectly fine, but if you want more features take a look at ohmybash.