I’ve had nothing but a great stable experience with it. I tried the other distros like endeavor and Garuda but they both looked ugly and had some issue after install. I think people hate manjaro because it’s bloated but I appreciated that everything I needed was already setup, configured and good to go.
I didn’t install any aur packages because those are unsupported and I don’t know enough to support them myself.
I used to be a huge Manjaro fan. There were many ways it let me down, some of which were just bad governance.
The biggest problem though is the AUR. Manjaro uses packages that are older than Arch. The AUR assumes the Arch packages. This, if your use the AUR with Manjaro, your system will break.
It is not a question of if Manjaro will break but when. Every ex-Manjaro user has the same story.
For me, EndeavourOS is everything that Manjaro should be.
There are many cases where Manjaro causes problems. For example, a package mag already be in Arch but not yet in Manjaro. Or perhaps the Manjaro package is not a high enough version number. If another Arch package requires this first package, in Arch it would grab the Arch package. The Arch package will be maintained over time. In Manajaro, the package is not there and so the AUR grabs it from the AUR as well. Perhaps it is even the Git version with an unclear version number. Over time, the AUR dependency breaks or becomes unmaintained. Even once Manjaro has the package, it may not migrate it because of the version numbers. Now things are broken. This exact thing happened to me on Manjaro where my GIMP ended up using GEGL from the AUR. My system was broken for months.
An even worse problem can happen when there are alternate dependencies. Sometimes in the AUR you will have multiple packages that fulfill a dependency. In Arch, you can see if one is from the actual repos and one is itself from the AUR. Again, if you choose the one in the repos, it will work and stay supports. In Manjaro, neither may be coming from the actual repos in which case it is easy to choose the wrong one. This sets you up to have package conflicts. In Manjaro, I would never know that the other option had now been added to the repos. More than once, I had the dependency that I had chosen break when the other would still have been fine.
Ok, this is getting long and that was just a couple of scenarios.
Suffice it to say, when I used Manjaro, I got the impression that the AUR broke all the time and that using the AUR broke my install from time to time. Now that I use Arch, I do not have those issues and I realize that it was Manjaro all along.
the package is not there and so the AUR grabs it from the AUR as well. Perhaps it is even the Git version with an unclear version number
You will see that the aur package will use a git version and you will also be asked to remove the conflicting package when you are installing a git version.
And once again, this isn’t unique to manjaro, on my arch install yuzu broke because they were using dynarmic from the aur instead of using the one provided by yuzu itself.
Also gimp and gegl are already on both the arch and manjaro official repos, If you are using git packages and you don’t update them lots of things will break regardless if you are on any arch distro.
Now I wonder if pamac checks for updates of git packages by default, because your git packages will not be updated unless you explicitly tell yay to do so (yay --devel) I think paru every does it automatically with every update but then again most people will use yay instead.
Suffice it to say, when I used Manjaro, I got the impression that the AUR broke all the time and that using the AUR broke my install from time to time. Now that I use Arch, I do not have those issues and I realize that it was Manjaro all along.
My experience has been quite the opposite, a few months ago my install broke to the point that I could not update the system, turns out it was because of the arch migration and my system wasn’t incorporating the new pacman.conf.new.
That’s not how source packages work. The only way they’d break is in case of major upstream changes. Which do happen, but the only inconvenience would be recompiling the package. Which you’re supposed to do anyway.
Do you reinstall your AUR packages after an update? If yes, you will never see them break on Manjaro or Arch. If you don’t, they will break on both Manjaro and Arch.
I am not theorizing. And I am not taking about source code not compiling. I am talking about dependencies which includes the reports version numbers and version number expectations of packages maintained by different parties. Those broke all the time for me on Manjaro and it was often because of the differences between what was in the Arch repos vs the Manjaro repos.
When Manjaro fell behind at one point, I ended up with a version of GEGL ( labeled - git ) being pulled from the AUR. Later releases of GIMP refused to upgrade over that version of GEGL. I just lived with it for a few months hoping it would clear itself up but it never did. I basically had to back everything my out and install again. Not that it was hard but these kinds of annoyances happened for me all the time on Mnajaro and basically never on EbdeavourOS or Arch.
What made me move away from Manjaro to begin with were all the problems it had with the dotnet packages at the time. I blamed dotnet and the AUR and was amazed that the problems went away when I used EndeavourOS instead.
If what you describe were true it would make AUR packages fail (on any Arch distro) if the user failed to upgrade their system each time, every time an update came out. The two week delay practiced by Manjaro is a completely arbitrary period of timen in the grand scheme of things. There are users who only upgrade once a month or even more seldom and nothing like this happens to them.
The AUR doesn’t assume arch packages, if the package your aur script wants isn’t in your repo then the package simply fails to update/install.
Edit: This is true even for Arch linux, as the Aur package might be out of date.
The problem is not the package. It is the packages Version. If you have for example an application that depends on .net 7.0 and arch updates it to the latest 8.0 then the AUR usually gets updated soon as well. Now the AUR pqckage depends on the newer 8.0 Version while manjaro still has the 7.0 version. The programm now does no longer start on manjaro.
I am not the most technically astute person, using Manjaro and the AUR for like five years and never had my system break. Yes, some package problems here and there, but where do you not have them ever? And so far nothing an internet search couldn’t fix. I found it very stable both in the XFCE and the KDE spin.
if your use the AUR with Manjaro, your system will break.
If your system breaks because of AUR it means you’re using AUR wrong… you’re not supposed to use AUR packages for critical system functions. It will break on Arch too if you do that.
There was a lot of misinformation about manjaro regarding the “Aur DDOS” and their finances that people still repeat to this day.
The person maintaining the manjarno repo which was a very popular site where all the critism of manjaro was recently corrected all those mistakes and then later took the website down.
Used Manjaro in the past, worst distros i’ve used. Wifi card detections, Screen display and kernel issues,. Re-installed it many times. Never had thoses problems with Arch, Debian, & Ubuntu
That's a good point, I could jus try debian and remove the unnecessary stuff. I want my daughter to use this laptop so it needs some video codecs and hopefully some educational games.
Some commenters said you need a minimum of 2GB memory to run Debian. What do you make of that?
AntiX! Of course. I thought Antix had merged with Mepis to create MX. Didn't know they were still around. probably the best choice since it still seems to be based on Debian Stable
I have a Surface Go 1 with the 128gb ssd drive that I bought as a cheap computer while I got separated from my ex in 2019. I bought it for around 4-500$ with an included typecover.
While I’m really happy with it, it’s not what I’d recommend as you really need to hook it up to a monitor when you’re at home. It’s powerful enough for me with its 8gb of ram, but the lack of upgradability is a long term problem.
I guess yours sounds too expensive and already lacking in term of specs. If I were you, I’d at least look for a more powerful second hand Surface Go as Fedora runs perfectly on it (except the camera and slow blutooth for the mouse).
The tablet and 2 in 1 surface devices are pretty much laptops (at least same architecture and bootloader) amd they’ve been easy to boot other stuff with in my somewhat limited experience.
Don’t misunderstand me, it’s still a good experience, but it’s still the most difficult Linux optimization I’ve ever had since I started installing Linux on all my computers around 2005.
But the form factor is really great if you move a lot and it’s a good tiny laptop with the typecover.
I’ve never installed the Surface kernel so I don’t know how much it would improve the experience.
I think you are understating the value of the Arch Wiki and AUR.
I am also a university student. I was required by one of my courses to program an Arduino using ArduinoIDE. My program, however, was not detecting my Arduino. By simply scrolling the Arch wiki, I found the issue, downloaded the fix via AUR and was able to get it working hassle-free. An equivalent of this process does not exist on NixOS.
I do not know what programs your uni requires, but if you do plan on using them on Linux, Debian or Arch, or their many derivatives should be the go-to simply for documentation and quick-fixes alone.
If you can run the Raspberry Pi Desktop that would be good. Wayland and I think very light.
I am thinking about installing that on Fedora, rebranding and all, to have an actually small Wayland Desktop, because the current options are either WMs or bigger Desktops
I’d say 4GB of RAM is barely enough. It’ll probably do for the things you mentioned. But opening a browser and surfing the web, or using modern Electron apps/software will quickly get you to the limit.
Another idea would be buying something second-hand / refurbished. It’ll get you better specs for roughly the same money. But probably not a Surface or a tablet, so YMMV with that approach.
Thanks for the hint. I guess I was a bit over-eager since I’ve been thinking about getting one for quite some time and now this “bargain” appeared out of nowhere. :/
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