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
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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.
I heard that the maintainers let some important web certificates expire, which is a big no-no.
Multiple times. https://manjarno.snorlax.sh/
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.
I enjoy Manjaro and I would even say its the reason I switched to linux (I didn’t like the other distros) but I’ve had updates that brick my operating system however this isnt so much of a problem for me now since i back up my data and use timeshift now.
I think most of the Manjaro hate comes from people comparing it to arch linux
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!
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.
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.
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”
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.
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 liked it but I had issues with changing versions of libraries for development. Sometimes I couldn’t run older versions of some code so I had to go back to Debian.
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.
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 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.