Powered by Arkdep from the Arkane Linux project this exciting new Manjaro variant is available for public testing right now! The goal of this release is to gather community feedback on the technology powering Manjaro Immutable. Note that this is only an experimental release and not representative of the final version, there is also no support guarantee, so hold off on installing it as your primary operating system, at least for now. We are hugely interested in gathering your feedback on Ma...
It kinda feels like it goes against what Manjaro was supposed to be though. A safer version of Arch but with about the same features, including its massive software pool to pull from - and that exactly is what would fall flat in this case, since you’d need very selectively maintained “packages”, which would be extremely limited in comparison to someone with access to regular repos and the AUR.
I don’t know how Manjaro plans to do it, but Universal Blue distros have access to the entire set of
dnfrepositories, including non-free packages. You runrpm-ostree install, and it layers the package you want. Each system update re-layers the custom package layer after upgrading the system layer.But since this is pre-alphaware, it’s kind of early to be passing judgement on how/if they’ll have access to the AUR and whether you could layer packages. Seems like the “safety” aspect is served through having an immutable system, which ensures end users have the same base as everyone else.
And it’s fine if that’s not your cup of tea. Sounds like it’s not. Arch, openSUSE, Debian, and their mutable descendants aren’t going anywhere.
I don’t know for the AUR, but the regular repos seem to be already accessible. You can try them with pacman, but the installed packages will be deleted at the moment of the update, or you can create a custom image and add the wanted packages which will be reinstalled at every update.