I’ve seen a lot of people who quite dislike Manjaro, and I’m not really sure why. I’m myself am not a Manjaro user, but I did use it for quite a while and enjoyed my experienced, as it felt almost ready out of the box. I’m not here to judge, just wanted to hear the opinion of the community on the matter. Thanks!
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Opinion you said?.. https://manjarno.snorlax.sh/
Thankfully the Manjaro team didn’t seem to have a major mess-up recently, but they did have some very troubled past. Especially now that Arch has a real installer that bundles entire DEs for you, the premise of using an “Arch Linux but easy to use” OS seems less and less
To each their own though! Nothing wrong with using Manjaro at all if someone really likes it
I heard that the maintainers let some important web certificates expire, which is a big no-no.
Manjaro is what got me into Arch so I’ll always have a soft spot for it. I don’t keep up with internet drama so much but I do remember people saying some stuff about the devs being shady/shitty. But I’m not sure how much truth there is to that.
Manjaro is what got me into Arch
Is Manjaro even considered an Arch? I though it’s Arch based. Maybe I’m wrong
It is. It’s so close that you can out of the box use arch package manager to install packages.
And manjaro package management is technically the same. Just slowed down a little bit.You could say that arch is “testing” and manjaro “stable”.
Although arch is very stable in itself, don’t think of it as of Gentoo Unstable.
Rather “manjaro will have the newest kernel after a few months, not tomorrow”
I have heard things previously about Manjaro that make me want to avoid it.
OTOH, as an Arch user, some of the things I feel could use improvement are better with Manjaro. Pretty much every Arch derivative does something about the major pain points of Arch, though, slapping on a installation gui (though, honestly, just advertising the archinstall CLI script that’s on the install usb stick and fixing it up a bit would help Arch), and giving you an AUR helper by default.
I recently tried the XFCE version of Endeavor in a vm, and I quite like it, so if I move from Arch, I’m more inclined to go that direction.
It has no meaningful place or benefits and everyone defending it seems to just be saying “erm, well why not!” and ignoring the problems its caused when compared to distros like endeavouros
This. It feels like they occupy this weird space between stable and rolling releases that doesn’t really accomplish much. Add on the issues (technical and ethical) over the years, and Manjaro occupies a strange place. Especially as EndeavourOS and even the arch-install script have evolved, it doesn’t quite hold the “arch on easy-mode” vibe it used to.
Never used it, but in my mind it will always be the distribution that told its users to roll the date on their machines back because they forgot to renew their website’s SSL certificate.
Twice.
That’s about as bad as Cinnamon coming with an option to automatically kill it and restart if its memory leaks grow beyond a certain size.
Manjaro was the first Linux distro I used as a daily driver, from October 2020 to July 2021, when I switched to EndeavourOS. To be fair the main reason I switched was all those previous mess-ups by the developers and the troubled past, which I didn’t know of when I moved to Linux. In the year or so I used it, I didn’t have any messed update or crash myself.
I would say it’s still a fine distro for beginners who want to try a rolling release (as EndeavourOS is imho better in every way, but it doesn’t come with any GUI package manager so I wouldn’t call it a distro for absolute beginners), but can’t see any other usage case, as it’s especially risky if you want to use packages from the AUR.
I tried it on bare metal some years ago. The main issue I had was that it wasn’t very stable and I kept running into bugs that made the system hard to use. I’m sure they have fixed that by now but that was my experience.
It seems alright but I’ve seen a lot of issues.
Back when I contributed to ALMA - we’d constantly get issues created by Manjaro users, as it wouldn’t work due to Manjaro having the kernel package set up differently IIRC.
I’d just use Arch Linux tbh, it’s only painful the first time.
I’d just use Arch Linux tbh, it’s only painful the first time.
Makes sense. There’s nothing wrong with vanilla Arch. But may I ask, why should someone use vanilla Arch instead of Arch based like Endevour? Not judging or anything, I’m just not sure if there are any advantages for using vanilla Arch?
Endeavour can also have similar issues due to packaging differences, but it’s much rarer. i.e. only these ones are maintained separately - https://github.com/endeavouros-team/PKGBUILDS
But in general it can make getting support a bit harder, that’s why I like using more popular distros.
That’s interesting, I thought Endevour uses the Arch repo
Endavour or arch doesn’t really make a difference imo, endavour uses the exact arch repos and only has an extra repo with stuff like AUR helpers, pre-configured DEs and a special script for properly setting up nvidia-dkms drivers.
The main benefit of using/installing arch at least once is that you’ll learn quite a bit about the workings of the system. I did a manual arch install a few times and these days I usually just install endavour for the sensible defaults and pre installed QoL packages that I’m too lazy to search for and install on arch.
Been testing it for a week now. The installation was straightforward and I like the UI in Settings for changing kernels, mhwd is an easy tool for gfx drivers, etc. I install stuff either with pacman or flatpak and it’s a very good experience. I do miss the integration with btrfs/snapshots from SuSE Tumbleweed though. One downside with TW was it couldn’t display Twitch videos until I reinstalled some media libs from another repository, that stuff worked out of the box with Manjaro. But that’s minor.
I’ll probably go back to SuSE TW some day, but it’ll be a while as I won’t bother reinstalling for now. Everything works well, it’s a good and slick distrib.
I ran it in a virtual once and liked it well enough.
The main difference I can see between Arch and Manjaro so far is I can install Manjaro and get a bootable system. :-) So far Arch has defeated me. My most recent attempt was with
archlinux-2022.12.01-x86_64.iso(twice). The image sits in my temp dir mocking me.i used manjaro for a while but endeavour felt a lot more stable when i switched, im on nobara now though
Used it for a year, hated it after the year (but enjoyed it while using because it was better than other distros becaus of Arch underneath).
Manjaro was always a hard and buggy mess to install something from the AUR or to change GPU drivers, its easy to break the system but in my Opinion Ubuntu is even easier to break and not understand what is going on.
Maybe its just me, maybe I need Arch, Debian or to fully set my system from the ground up. (I switched from Manjaro to Arch and never needed to reinstall Arch ever again compared to Manjaro)
I liked it when I used it but that was 5 years ago and there was still dev drama even back then. Contributors said they didn’t feel valued iirc.
I like the idea and used Manjaro for a few years, but its run by less competent people than Id like (or at least in comparison to other distros), so I stopped and moved to a different distro.
