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!
I heard that the maintainers let some important web certificates expire, which is a big no-no.
Multiple times. https://manjarno.snorlax.sh/
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.
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
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.
deleted by creator
That’s about as bad as Cinnamon coming with an option to automatically kill it and restart if its memory leaks grow beyond a certain size.
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.
I heard some security issues with it, can’t confirm.
Manjaro is what happens when you have a really nice installer for arch linux and some neat extras; but it’s made by people who looked at a 20 minute youtube tutorial about the subject and think they’re now the best in their subject even though they barely know how to refresh their own domain name.
if you want an arch-like experience use something like
XeroxLinux
,arco linux
, orEndeavourOS
instead, they all have their own place in the arch space and are way better at teaching you how to actually use and maintain your system rather than throw some system at it that will break because it is barely maintained and arch is a rolling release distro.Brodie Robertson on youtube did a series of videos on the different fuckups by the manjaro team ranging from not refreshing their domain name, DDOS-ing the AUR with their tooling, and pushing broken patches upstream with a rat’s ass of knowledge of what’s actually going on.
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 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.
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 used manjaro for a while but endeavour felt a lot more stable when i switched, im on nobara now though
Used it for a year, hated it after the year (but enjoyed it while using because it was better than other distros becaus of Arch underneath).
Manjaro was always a hard and buggy mess to install something from the AUR or to change GPU drivers, its easy to break the system but in my Opinion Ubuntu is even easier to break and not understand what is going on.
Maybe its just me, maybe I need Arch, Debian or to fully set my system from the ground up. (I switched from Manjaro to Arch and never needed to reinstall Arch ever again compared to Manjaro)
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.
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.
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.