I have flashed manjaro kde, xfce, and gnome successfully following the guide at the middle of this post: Updating instructions for reflashing and booting off EMMC?
I used this release found on github:
https://github.com/manjaro-arm/radxa-zero-images/releases/tag/20211206
also…I unarchived the .xz so that the image was uncompressed (.img vs .img.xz). I’ve had issues in the past when trying to flash a compressed image to disk.
(there is a new image for 1213 just released but I’ve had no issues with the 1206 version…and since it’s manjaro, you can just pacman -Syu to update the system to latest anyway…)
Can anyone follow the instructions and let me know if it works for you? If you are on windows, using the default guide with the gui programs that radxa mentions and Etcher is fine; just confirm after you’re done if there is a boot and root partitions are created. Then you’ll want to figure out how to get uboot.bin onto the drive… (which in Linux land, it’s by using dd if=uboot.bin of=/dev/<diskname> bs=512 seek=1)
The reason it doesn’t boot (in my experience) is because the image doesn’t have whatever uboot.bin adds to the boot partition or emmc disk.