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!
Back then, the community was much better and the distro was perfectly alright for everyone who wants Arch-based distro but without the complexity of setting up Arch.
In 2017, Vulcan moved to mainline Arch, not due to the community but because of personal desire to try and learn Arch the Arch way. Antergos and now EndeavourOS have less development drama, so Vulcan now recommends it instead of Manjaro.
manjaro was my way in to arch. i used the fully configured xfce version, then several versions of the minimal install until i got something i liked, and didn't break after a couple of weeks.
if you were to ask me for a recommendation on an arch based distro i'd say endeavour, but manjaro is perfectly fine.
@IUsedTo Recently migrated from Manjaro > Arch > NixOS.
I enjoyed Manjaro! Ignoring some of the issues outlined in other resources (one in this thread) which are completely valid, I think its a good way to get involved in the arch/arch-based space. I felt it was very easy to setup and get running. Most of the software support seemed pretty great and it was relatively snappy. I had no issues during my time (although I didn't need to use the AUR) and would definitely recommend it to others considering it.
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 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 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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).
Endavour or arch doesn't really make a difference imo, endavour uses the exact arch repos and only has an extra repo with stuff like AUR helpers, pre-configured DEs and a special script for properly setting up nvidia-dkms drivers.
The main benefit of using/installing arch at least once is that you'll learn quite a bit about the workings of the system. I did a manual arch install a few times and these days I usually just install endavour for the sensible defaults and pre installed QoL packages that I'm too lazy to search for and install on arch.
I just switched from Manjaro to endeavor OS. The AUR was just too useful and consistently breaking with Manjaro. The distro overall was fine outside of those issues. But I'm definitely liking endeavor OS a little more. And not just for the AUR. The Manjaro team has had a bit of drama It seems going on inside. They left their domains and certificates laps multiple times. It's definitely not confidence inspiring. But if you only use Manjaro and their repositories it's a pretty decent time.
Well even without that there have been several broken packages that would cause systems to be unbootable when installed. But yes sticking with just the major positories and flat packs would help. As well as taking your time on upgrades and letting other people test it out first. I may be a bit too old school these days. (Started using Linux in the early '90s) I hate snaps. Flat packs are okay but if I can get native binaries I'll generally go for them.
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.
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"
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