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!
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.
I use Manjaro ARM on my Orange PI because I couldn’t get Arch ARM to work on it, while Manjaro has support of my devices out of the box. Since I installed a minimal possible version (without any DE), it doesn’t feel bloated or something. It feels like I’m using Arch but with slower updates. Overall, it’s good and I don’t notice much difference from Arch. But anyway, I haven’t tried it for a desktop station.
I installed Manjaro sometime during 2018, and I have been using it without any major issues. The only issue I had is when AUR packages fail to update. I find that most of the time the issue will resolve itself eventually anyway. Overall, I feel that Manjaro is a nice and stable distro.
The only negative I can think of is the community. At the time, I was bluntly told to read the manual whenever I needed help or pointers. But, my negative experience was from a few years ago, so hopefully the community has improved today.
My daily driver distro today is Mint, which I think is more polished than Manjaro.
It's still too arch-y for me. I ran it for a while and got pretty common breaking updates. No I will not read and understand changelogs on the forum every week.
I doesn't deserve the hate it gets, it's not that big of a project but it's being treated like it pushed kids to kill themselves, the devs fucked up a few times and made some questionable decision (freeoffice...) but they put upe a nice working distro and aren't completely insane like the gnome/ubuntu devs
Irresponsible devs, delayed packages for no reason causing massive issues with ours and quite often invalid site certificates due to neglect. It's just arch but worse since it uses their repo which delays packages for practically no reason causing aur incompatibilities. Endeavour is a far better distro for beginners (or arch install script) with the exception of it not having pamac preinstalled.
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.
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
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 used Manjaro for 7 years (until 2020) and I can say it's not that bad. However if you're gonna use AUR that's a big NO. Without using AUR it should be stable though they did screw things up, like big Nvidia purge, and when they become more frequent I bailed out. Using EndeavourOS for quite some time and couldn't be more happy. (I'm lazy to install Arch so Endeavour does its job perfectly.)
I have a love/hate relationship with Manjaro which boils down to its packages.
I love how pretty much everything is configurable in a GUI. Need to install an older kernel, there's a GUI for it. Need to enable Flatpak or AUR in your package manager, its a toggle switch.
What I don't like is the delayed packages since it messes with AUR. On my machine the Intel Compute Run time keep conflicting with its own dependency. I tried to fix it by installing from AUR, but that didn't fix everything.
Then as I was trying for fix it again I accidentally uninstalled something from the desktop dependency and I couldn't log back into the desktop environment. Thankfully unlike in Windows I was able to get a terminal up and backup my files.
Manjaro lasted 1 year on my machine and was very good. Especially for games. But for my needa I needed something more stable, and a lot more idiot proof (bare minimum separate the games from the os packages).
Moved to Fedora and been loving it. Sure it took I think a month for my DX12 games to work again in Proton, but I can't uninstall OS packages from Discover or Software.
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