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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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.
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.
Ive started out on linux as a Manjaro user, and I still think it’s a great beginner distro, pamac (add/remove software app) being one of the most useful things which im glad it came preinstalled.
But there are great frustrations about using the aur as half of the packages wont build, so I dont think it will give new users a good arch experience at all as they are just so annoying, new users should opt for endeavour instead of manjaro.
Also I dont think i would the manjaro team to not screw up things and cause issues such as shipping a broken kernal or whatever they do after the lastest drama, so I dont think I will ever get back to it when there are better arch based distros
(currently i run vanilla arch)
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”
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?
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.
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.
I’ve been using it for nearly 3 years and encountered minimal issues. I’m using it on a Lenovo E14 all AMD laptop, mostly for gaming and web browsing.
I just switched from Manjaro to endeavor OS. The AUR was just too useful and consistently breaking with Manjaro. The distro overall was fine outside of those issues. But I’m definitely liking endeavor OS a little more. And not just for the AUR. The Manjaro team has had a bit of drama It seems going on inside. They left their domains and certificates laps multiple times. It’s definitely not confidence inspiring. But if you only use Manjaro and their repositories it’s a pretty decent time.
Manjaro had a rough history of not taking security seriously. I hope they have improved, but the impression stuck.
They have done a few things right by making Arch more approachable when Arch was more of a RTFM type distribution. Now Arch is easier and even ships with an installer, but Manjaro’s installer is easy.
The end result is still that the user still needs to manage an Arch distro. I would recommend learning the Arch way from Arch instead of taking the easy road.
If you want an easy distro, rolling releases, and up-to-date packages, I would recommend Debian Did over Manjaro. If you want Arch, use Arch.
I heard that the maintainers let some important web certificates expire, which is a big no-no.
I see some people say Manjaro has no place–to just use Arch or some other easier to use distro. IMO the more linux distros the better. I think many believe that more distros means its harder to get support, but using linux is also about being resourceful, and many things other distro communities have solved can be utilized in other distros.
Innovations that Manjaro makes can have an impact on their upstream, and the linux community as a whole. It fills a niche that might get someone to use linux that otherwise wouldn’t. At the end of the day what helps out all of the linux community is the number of users.
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.
It’s fine. Sometimes an update breaks the stuff installed via aur, that’s fixable by issuing a command like that:
yay -S $(pacman -Qoq /usr/lib/python3.11) --answerclean All
Otherwise it works rocksolid. I’ve got it for 2 years on my thinkpad and no issues. Are there better Arch like distros? Probably. Would I choose another distro like Endeavour OS when I have to make fresh install? Probably. But until then, its okay.
Mostly negative. My experience using the distro was very short and quiet some time ago. I found it very buggy and unpolished, and it ended up broken by itself on both my desktop and laptop. I wanted to switch to a more bleeding edge distro after spending 9 years with Debian. After that I found a new home with Fedora.
Irresponsible devs, delayed packages for no reason causing massive issues with ours and quite often invalid site certificates due to neglect. It’s just arch but worse since it uses their repo which delays packages for practically no reason causing aur incompatibilities. Endeavour is a far better distro for beginners (or arch install script) with the exception of it not having pamac preinstalled.
I heard some security issues with it, can’t confirm.
