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!
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
Manjaro is what happens when you have a really nice installer for arch linux and some neat extras; but it’s made by people who looked at a 20 minute youtube tutorial about the subject and think they’re now the best in their subject even though they barely know how to refresh their own domain name.
if you want an arch-like experience use something like
XeroxLinux,arco linux, orEndeavourOSinstead, they all have their own place in the arch space and are way better at teaching you how to actually use and maintain your system rather than throw some system at it that will break because it is barely maintained and arch is a rolling release distro.Brodie Robertson on youtube did a series of videos on the different fuckups by the manjaro team ranging from not refreshing their domain name, DDOS-ing the AUR with their tooling, and pushing broken patches upstream with a rat’s ass of knowledge of what’s actually going on.
I heard that the maintainers let some important web certificates expire, which is a big no-no.
Multiple times. https://manjarno.snorlax.sh/
Doesn’t really affect most end-users in a practical way. But I get it, that slippery slope.
Hmmm, today I got some more information: packaging in-development software as if it were a stable release… without the developers’ permission. Also trying to put proprietary software in Manjaro but backing down after the community was upset.
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”That actually makes a lot of sense. Thank you so much for the info!
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
It does for most things, just those are separate.
It’s like how SteamOS gives its repos precedence for their own packages.
It does, it just has an extra repo that contains some more packages. IIRC, most of these packages, both on EndeavourOS and ArcoLinux, are packages compiled from the AUR to make it easier to install them (Although ArcoLinux has some of its own packages as well).
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.
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 my intro to Linux, but now that I know more about it, I can’t recommend it in good conscience. Letting their SSL certs expire is something that happens (even though they could automate it), but telling their users to change their clocks so it works is a big no-no.
Worse than that is how they manage packages from upstream. Simply freezing them for two weeks is, in my opinion, the worst of both worlds. You don’t get timely security updates, but you still end up with the issues of being on the bleeding edge - just late. It also means that if you use the AUR (which is really one of the biggest perks of Arch-based systems), it’s possible that the necessary dependencies are out of date.
I think that if one wants “Arch with an installer” they should go with EndeavourOS, or try the
archinstallscript.Simply freezing them for two weeks
That’s not what they’re doing at all. That dumb myth needs to die.
Can you expand on this? A source would be great here to properly debunk this.
Sure. When it comes to updates, Manjaro is pretty much doing what every single other distro is doing. Updates that are buggy don’t get pushed to the stable branch until they’re fixed up, and security updates tend to get pushed through faster than feature updates. The time period that updates get held up by is not a fixed duration, it depends on the specific package and update and can be anywhere between a few days and a few weeks.
As a concrete example, with some major Plasma updates Manjaro has waited for three or even four point releases (4 / 8 weeks) before considering it stable enough vs the newest point release of the previous major release, and following point releases after that get pushed to stable much faster.
As another point, even Arch has a very similar process… Their policy on pushing updates is far more geared towards pushing updates quickly than towards not breaking things, but otherwise it’s pretty much the same.
Idk about a source on this stuff though. There’s stuff like https://wiki.manjaro.org/index.php/Switching_Branches but I don’t know anything better.
Manjaro packages start their lives in the unstable branch. Once they are a deemed stable, they are moved to the testing branch, where more tests will be realized to ensure the package is ready to be submitted to the stable branch
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.
I hardly ever use AUR, just the Manjaro repositories and flatpaks, so that may explain why I missed most of the headaches.
Well even without that there have been several broken packages that would cause systems to be unbootable when installed. But yes sticking with just the major positories and flat packs would help. As well as taking your time on upgrades and letting other people test it out first. I may be a bit too old school these days. (Started using Linux in the early '90s) I hate snaps. Flat packs are okay but if I can get native binaries I’ll generally go for them.
We’re from the same school, apparently. I’m too lazy to distro hop like I used to.
Regarding flatpaks, I prefer some apps (browsers, games) to not have full access to all my files so I use them as for the isolation features.
May I ask what DE are you using? Just curious to see what DE other people uses on Manjaro.
I’m using XFCE. It has been my choice for many years. It is simple, unobtrusive, light on resources.
It is ultimately your choice, but from the many instances of poor communication, carelessness or whatever it was, I can’t personally recommend it.
Even from a new user viewpoint they are often not helpful, reverting to rtfm, something that is expected on base arch, but not on something that supposedly wants to be preinstalled on hardware.
I wish them the best and hope that the ship eventually sails without hiccups.
Too many instances of poor management, and the 2 week package delay issue.
Doesn’t seem to be a good reason to use it when Endeavour exists.
Exactly. I have not looked back since changing to EndeavourOs!
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.
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.
I’ve been using Manjaro for years and find it to be a solid distro to do your daily stuff. Running it with KDE on Wayland and its super smooth. Pretty much keep it up to date often and use pamac to update instead of pacman and things tend to go well.
As good as Arch but with a little more hand-holding. Graphical installation, package manager in tray out of the box and not the most bleeding edge versions.
At home, where it’s ok to once a year spend some time googling what went wrong and I’d be installing from command line anyway (my $HOME remembers a few other distros and is very fragmented), I use Arch.
For mom’s, grandma’s and work computers, where I want to just hit update and be done, I use Manjaro.
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.
