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 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.
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 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AUR (which is really one of the biggest perks of Arch-based systems), it’s possible that the necessary dependencies are out of date.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 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.
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.
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”
In my opinion, people should just use Arch with the archinstall script if they need help or EndeavourOS for an easy GUI installer.
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.
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
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.Personally I use it when I need to spin up a medium to long term virtual machine.
It’s fast to set up, it’s fresher than a debian based one and you can easily “get dirty” with off the beaten path choices, if you want. Having easy access to the AUR is really a great plus too.
I would never use it as my main distro or as a real OS on the HDD, tho. For that it’s just better to use Arch directly, and with the “new” installer it’s relatively fast and painless too.
I feel it has its place as a middle ground for someone that wants to learn more about using linux, but who is not really ready to leave the comfort of having an opinionated preassembled experience.
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 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.
