A question about system default system tools/kernel modules/themes and what ever else.
I was wondering if there is a tool for checking what the various defaults are of the Netrunner/Manjaro system and compare it to your system to see if there are any, especially low level tools or other changes that are default in a new Netrunner/Manjaro install but have not been installed on your system because Netrunner/Manjaro don’t want to tamper with your system, since Netrunner/Manjaro are quite hands of from your system and seem to try to change as little as possible.
I can understand the philosophy of not messing with ones installed system and maybe even appreciate to to a certain degree. I would not for example want with every update my desktop wallpaper changed for example. On the other hand I would assume that the people in the know-how (Netrunner/Manjaro devs) have a reason for changing from one system tool to another and most likely it has been done for the better, hopefully.
I know that with the announcement of the updates there is usually a list of the changes, however, it is quite easy to miss those and miss what changes have occurred.
So is there an easy way of checking and comparing your system to the current defaults of the Netrunner/Manjaro distribution?..
No, not really. As you mentioned, when there is a tool/utility change it is in the announcements from Manjaro and/or the announcements that I make here in the forums. However when there are system config file change, pacman will make .pacsave, .pacnew, and .pacorig file depending on the circumstances of that change for this reason, It’s recommended to look over these files when they are created. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pacnew_and_Pacsave_files
Note: The reason Netrunner and later Manjaro changed to TLP was because I had noticed that LMT was a out of date in the Manjaro repositories, after I investigated this issue I noticed that LMT was no longer in the upstream Arch repositories and that they had replaced it with TLP months prior. So at this point I tested TLP on my own system and found it easier to setup and use, with little to no configuring on my end, so I brought this to both the Manjaro and Netrunner developers/maintainers, the rest is history as they say.
PS. Manjaro has not stopped supporting LMT for those that already have it installed, that is why they continue to maintain this package themselves in their repositories. What happened was that prior to the latest update to LMT, the upstream developers changed how LMT kept it’s configuration and the Manjaro developers didn’t notice this change. What the LMT developers changed was all of the settings that used to be in various config files are all now kept in this one file: /etc/laptop-mode/conf.d/runtime-pm.conf, when this happened the configuration changes that Manjaro had previously made their defaults were no longer being used. Manjaro is leaving it up to the users that installed their systems prior to the Manjaro 0.8.11 snapshot release whether or not to change over to TLP or make the needed modifications needed to LMT themselves.