Is there anybody whose had experience with both?
I’m trying to decide if I want to go back to Manjaro or get into Endeavour.
Endeavor seems like a better option. The majaro devs don’t seem particularly trustworthy as OS devs, mainly because they hold back security updates as a policy and have allowed things like ssl certs to lapse multiple times. Endeavor gets you the benefits Manjaro provides without the nonsense.
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I personally run on Arch since 2006, rolling that install along over these years. There were around 5 breaking changes in all that time that required a bit of intervention.
A few years back I set up my wives PC with Manjaro, hoping it would give her the same cutting edge experience with a bit more UI fluff to manage it. Boy was I wrong. I had to resolve package conflicts and broken boot sequences every other month.
I gave up and just installed Arch on that machine.
EndeavourOS is my preference. I appreciate that they don’t really modify the Arch experience in any annoying way. Manjaro seems to always break shit. Plus the EOS forums are amazing.
holy cow i had no idea manjaro was this bad
@yote_zip @neurodivergentAF lot’s of instability. Understandable. I’ll probably steer clear, if not completely away, from Manjaro :/
As someone who tried both, I think Endevour is better. 1.It’s more bleeding edge. 2. It’s as close to vanilla Arch as you can get with a gui installer. 3. The dev team seems to be more compitent then the Manjaro team (i.e: shit doesn’t break because someone pushed a WIP package). 4. Better community support (I mean, it’s literally just Arch with a fancy installer).
They’re both fairly easy to install. And it’s fairly easy to switch between the two.
It’s really not that hard to follow the wiki to install Arch. I feel like there’s a lot of maintaining to do when using Arch, so you might as well get used to the terminal. It wasn’t really an issue when I was using it daily, but has become a chore now that I boot up my laptop once or twice a month.
Funnily enough, I’m always on my Steam Deck now and that is based on Arch, too.
You have to remember that most people aren’t power users. A lot of people find if difficult to even install Windows. Vanilla Arch isn’t for everybody.
Honestly, in that case, I can’t recommend Arch to those users. Nothing wrong with Ubuntu for beginners and there’s so much documentation.
Is it? I thought SteamOS was based on Debian
Since SteamOS 3 it’s based on Arch
I did not know that. Thanks!
@slampisko Also with the next big update of SteamOS to 3.5 they will even integrate Nix package system officially! That means you can install packages in a persistent manner (not just Flatpaks).
There’s a years old Debian-based version available for download, but the version that ships on Steam Deck is significantly different and based on Arch.
Yeah, I’ve used Linux in some capacity since the late nineties and know my way around. I can’t be bothered to fiddle with an Arch install, I’ve moved on, I got better things to do. So I decided to try out EOS on my new laptop. A few clicks and it was running with proprietary NV drivers by default, which are updated as needed by yay. I was playing games within 20 min from my Steam Library preserved on another ssd.
Only thing I had to do was install btrfs-assistant, plasma-Wayland and whatever apps I need.
The most laborious bit was configuring various apps to use Wayland but that didn’t have to happen immediately.
EndeavourOS is the right answer.
I was expecting the responses to be more mixed. But pretty much the issues I see here confirms to me that Manjaro is not the winner. I think Endeavour is going to be the one I will install.
Nobody has mentioned the guided installer that now ships with the vanilla Arch iso:
archinstallI’ve done the Arch installation from scratch a few times to add some inches to my e-peen, but the CLI installer does everything so nicely that I haven’t bothered with a manual install for a while now.
I generally choose gnome (wayland), and add
pamac-nosnapfrom the AUR, and it’s a super user friendly experience. Especially if you choose to use BTRFS during the install and then setuptimeshiftand add thetimeshift-autosnappackage once you are in the DE. For the handful of times I’ve ever had an issue with a package update, I just roll back to a previous snapshot and I’m back in action.Endeavour
Endeavour is as close as you can get to pure Arch with a GUI installer + pretty neat QOL features OOTB (reflector to update mirrors, the AUR’s already installed and ready to go, etc). 90% of what applies to vanilla Arch applies to Endeavour when it comes to fixes, and the community is super helpful and friendly in my experience. It’s kinda light on stuff when compared to other ready to go Linux Distros, but hey, that just means less pre-installed apps you either never use or have to uninstall
Manjaro is an Arch based distro that kinda sucks at being an Arch based distro (essentially, the updates are held back by a couple of weeks for better and worse, WIP packages sometimes slip through to the repos and can cause problems to your system, and you can forget about using the AUR–or well, you can, but the AUR and Manjaro are nortorious for not playing nice with one another). Troubleshooting the thing tested my patience personally, because like someone else here said: it basically found a unique way to break itself every time I updated the system and I just got…tired, eventually. Manjaro also comes with basically everything you could possibly need pre-installed and then some, so that’s neat if you’re not in the mood to hunt down all your apps.
If you’re cool with using the terminal to update, install stuff (or you could also install pamac or Octopi, nothing’s stopping you, and it works) and troubleshoot, try Endeavour. You can make it exactly like Manjaro without the defects with a bit of work if you want
If you don’t mind being extra careful with what you install (really that’s standard practice, but hey, I’ve never found a WIP package anywhere other than Manjaro, so make of that what you will), are willing to tolerate constant mild to severe breakage, and just using Flatpaks and appimages over the AUR, go with Manjaro
I choose Endeavor because it’s basically Arch with GUI.
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@neurodivergentAF Go with EndeavourOS. I used Manjaro for 1.5 years and a little more. Just switched to EndeavourOS. I’m not listing here all the stuff that Manjaro did wrong, but rather point out a specific problem. Manjaro holding packages is a problem, if you ever use the AUR. Because the packages on the AUR normally expect the newest versions from Archlinux. So the mixture of hold back packages from Manjaro and the newest one from AUR can cause problems. And you can wait weeks before Manjaro updates the packages. And also I personally encountered 2 bugs with the pamac tool (which is recommended over pacman and handles the AUR as well), which one of them I reported and it got fixed.
I switched to EndeavourOS since half a year and don’t have any of these AUR concerns. The distro maintainer aren’t doing any obvious stupid stuff as well. It’s closer to real Archlinux and overall feels great.
I’ve been on Manjaro for about 1.5 years now too. I switched over to the Unstable branch a while back, which fixed this issue for me. This branch seems to be getting all packages at the same speed as regular Arch. Plus, I still get the Manjaro-specific kernels, access to their repos, integrated pamac, etc. For now, I’m sticking with Manjaro this way.
i’ve been using manjaro on an olderl desktop at the office, and in a vm at home, for a couple years now. i’ve never had an issue with it on either. i’ve used it enough to prefer onlyoffice now, over the other free msoffice alternatives.
went from manjaro to endevour (both kde). for me personally, there wasnt much difference, just less stuff preinstalled (bloat?) on endevouros.
EndeavourOS is basically Arch with a nice installer and a few extra QoL packages while Manjaro manages their own repositories and adds things like mhwd that change system management to be a little different than Arch.
I much prefer Endeavour since I already do everything from the command line anyway. Also, while most info about Arch applies to Manjaro it doesn’t always and I found that very annoying when trying to troubleshoot.
I’ve also installed Arch a few times and it went fine, but the Endeavour installer is a much nicer experience.
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