Manjaro – No 3270 emulator

Tried to install x3270 today…and it doesn’t exist in their repositories anymore! As a matter of fact, no 3270 emulator could be found. I thought Arch had everything? Maybe the writing was on the wall, the last time I installed it on Manjaro recently, it was in a foreign language! No love for mainframes? Just considered a dinosaur? Well maybe it’s time to change my backup distro from Manjaro. It’s a big enough issue for me to change. And no I don’t want to install from source.

It’s ironic that now they chose to remove the 3270 emulators at a time when mainframes are perhaps the most popular they’ve been in a long time! Maybe a few years ago you could have used the long standing argument that the mainframe is dead, a dinosaur and obsolete. But have you googled mainframe or COBOL in the last year?

You know which Linux distro still thinks mainframes are important? Uh, the one who IBM bought…Redhat! So that would actually be Fedora in my case! I’ve been hearing a lot of good stuff about Fedora in general lately. I think the last time I used Fedora it was version 5, as of today it’s on version 33. OpenSuse may also be an option, if I want to stick with KDE.