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.
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.
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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 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.
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.
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, 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 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, 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).
I used it for a while. It’s actually not that bad, but they made some really unprofessional blunders in the past and interacting with their main contributors is not very pleasant in my personal experience.
In the end it is mostly just Arch for noobs and it shows.
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 have heard things previously about Manjaro that make me want to avoid it.
OTOH, as an Arch user, some of the things I feel could use improvement are better with Manjaro. Pretty much every Arch derivative does something about the major pain points of Arch, though, slapping on a installation gui (though, honestly, just advertising the archinstall CLI script that’s on the install usb stick and fixing it up a bit would help Arch), and giving you an AUR helper by default.
I recently tried the XFCE version of Endeavor in a vm, and I quite like it, so if I move from Arch, I’m more inclined to go that direction.
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)
I’m also (was)? a manjaro user, and so would like to know the answer. Maybe people just liked the higher barrier of entry for Arch?
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