TROM-JARO 17.06.19
Mayank Sharma moves to an Arch-based distro that has one more mandate besides desktop friendliness.
Mayank Sharma moves to an Arch-based distro that has one more mandate besides desktop friendliness.
TROM-JARO isn’t your average derivative or a fork. Instead, think of it as an add-on. The distro doesn’t overwrite the Manjaro brand anywhere. Everything from the installer to the desktop features the Manjaro branding. The project just tweaks Manjaro to meet the objectives of the TROM project, of which more in a bit.
Unlike Manjaro, which is available with different desktop environments, TROM-JARO is only available with the Gnome 3 desktop and its rendition of it is heavily customised. The developers are fans of the minimalistic flat design and have removed Manjaro’s default styling elements. In addition to custom wallpapers, they use the flat Vimix theme that’s coupled with an elegant flat icon set called Zafiro, which has washed-out colours along with a touch of white.
Then there are the Gnome 3 extensions. The distro ships with several, many of which help style the desktop to make it more intuitive and clean than the default. The first one you’ll notice is Unite, which removes title bars on maximised windows and adds window controls to the top panel for maximised windows. The top-left corner hotspot that triggers the Activities Overview has also been disabled via an extension, while another groups the installed apps into folders, such as Disk, Office, Media and so on. Besides these, the distro also bundles some extensions that aren’t enabled by default, such as the one that enables you to place icons on the desktop.
The objective of the distro, and the crux of the tradefree movement TROM, is to avoid all forms of tradebased applications, which it identifies as those that want either your money, data or attention. This wasn’t much of an issue with Linux distros a couple of years back. These days, however, you’ll find several proprietary apps such as Skype and the Steam client in distros designed for the desktop, and Manjaro isn’t an exception. The TROM-JARO developers ensure that such apps don’t make it into the default installation. Instead, there’s an impressive list of apps that wouldn’t disappoint anyone who doesn’t use
Skype or Steam.
The one standout app that we’d like to mention is Firefox. The developers have enabled quite a few privacy-centric plugins, in addition to opting out from the app’s feature of sending anonymous usage data to Firefox HQ. Just like the Gnome extensions, many of the
Firefox plug-ins are enabled by default, while others can be enabled if required.
While you won’t find proprietary apps in the default installation, the developers don’t stop you from grabbing them on your own. In fact they’ve enabled Arch’s AUR repository by default. Their hope, however, is that if you need an app you’ll first take your queries to their curated list of trade-free apps at www.tromjaro.com/apps.
They’ve also tweaked the installation in a few other ways. For one, they’ve reduced the frequency of the update checks to once a week, so as to not inundate you with update notifications. They’ve also set up the
Timeshift app to take a backup of your system before any system update, to make sure you always have a working system in case any update breaks your installation.
The project’s website does have plenty of information to explain its objectives and the changes it has made to make Manjaro compliant. The multilingual website also has an illustrated guide to hand-hold new users through installation, which is more than adequate.
However, you won’t find any avenues for support. The project argues that since it doesn’t really modify Manjaro as such, users should take their queries to the Manjaro forums instead, which isn’t unreasonable but might put off some users.