No hate from me,but rather a simple question? Why use preconfigured distros instead of the original,always best, with archinstall script? You can even install pamac or whatever package installer tool manjaro uses.
The longer you spend in these internet communities, the more you’ll realize there’s a substantial amount of losers who can’t form their own opinions. They’ll just repeat whatever is popular in order to fit in.
I have almost a dozen installs of it in the wild for a few years now, with friends and relatives that aren’t very computer literate. It has been virtually maintenance free. This is on wildly disparate hardware as well, and it’s always installed nicely and with little messing around after to get things working.
People like to hate on it; it’s been by far the most reliable distro I’ve used, far better than "just works^TM " distros like Fedora and Ubuntu. I’d ignore the naysayers and use if it works for you.
I’ve had it break many times during update. Don’t get me wrong, I liked it at first, but if you want a system that works after update, you’re probably better checking elsewhere. Linux Mint, and Kubuntu are far better simplicity wise. Open Suse or Arch if you want rolling updates.
It works for me, I have KDE version. I have AUR apps, SNAP (VSC works better in snap than flatpak), official repo apps. I have not had any errors in the 6 months I have been using it.
The real question is, why are you considering Manjaro in the first place? What does it do that a different distro, without all the hate (which I personally think are 100% justified), doesn’t do? Why “risk” it?
Installing arch is a pain in the ass and the vast majority of people should not go through with it. If you like to tinker, go with arch. If you want a machine that just works out of the box, go with Manjaro.
If you don’t believe me, see for yourself. Don’t just believe people on the internet at face-value. Most of them are just regurgitating things they don’t understand in order to fit in.
Believe internet strangers? I had it on my laptop and Pinephone. After breaking twice on both, I went for Kubuntu then OpenSuse for desktop and PostmarketOS on the Pinephone.
You may be cheerleading for Manjaro but don’t discount experience of people that went there, suffered and want others to not suffer. If you really need easy to use Arch, EndeavourOS is far superior.
While Manjaro is perfectly fine, this is no longer true. With the archinstall script you can have even Arch up and running in minutes. It’s still not graphical or straightforward as a Manjaro installation, but it’s certainly not painful. EndeavourOS may be the closest to Arch with simple installation.
A great middle-ground is EndeavourOS. It has a great installer. It makes pretty decent choices. You have a pretty much 100% pure Arch system after install. There are only a couple dozen EndeavourOS packages and most of them are utilities. You can remove all the EndeavourOS stuff in a couple of minutes if you really want to and comment out the repos. Not sure why you would. Just pointing out how vanilla it is.
I would recommend reading through the first parts of the arch install tutorial, particularly the network connection through the terminal. If you’re comfortable with that, the archinstall utility makes the rest of the process effortless. I’ve had Manjaro bork itself but not just plain arch.
Then literally just use Arch. I don’t understand why people want Arch but then install something different. If you don’t want to go through the install process then it’s honestly just not for you, but if you really want to try anyway give EndeavourOS a shot.
People were saying this back when it was Antergos vs. Manjaro. You know what? I used Antergos and it shut the fuck down. Manjaro is still going strong. I’m still using Manjaro.
I think the bigger risk would be to use endeavor os, even if more people like to shill it (like you predictably did.)
But experience speaks for itself. Who cares what a bunch of losers on the internet say if your experience is different?
It’s not all “purists” and “tribalism”, Manjaro actually has issues. Besides the well known certificate issues and older packages, I have the following anecdote which made me really dislike it.
A friend has Manjaro and one day his nvidia drivers stopped working after an update. I helped troubleshoot over the phone, while looking over the wiki. For nvidia drivers they have their own wrapper around pacman.
Turns out there’s a different nvidia driver for each kernel version. Already a stupid design. So unlike arch where there’s 1 kernel package (the latest the distro offers) and 1 matching nvidia driver, Manjaro has dozens…
The wiki never mentions how to install or update the drivers manually with pacman or anything like that. It pushes their own tool, a stupid wrapper around pacman, which is supposed to manage this for you.
In my friend’s case, the tool failed. It was trying to run pacman but there was a conflict issue. But the tool didn’t show the pacman output, so we couldn’t figure out what the tool is trying to do, and why it doesn’t work. We tried removing the tool and re-installing, and all kinds of messing around with it. It failed to install the drivers, it failed to remove the drivers, it kept failing whatever we tried.
Eventually we figured out the naming convention they used for the packages (again not mentioned in the wiki), and manage to install the correct kernel - driver pair manually, using pacman.
Tl;dr: poor design, bad documentation, and they push their own crappy tools which hinder instead of helping
there’s a different nvidia driver for each kernel version. Already a stupid design
That’s not a stupid design at all. A nvidia kernel module artifact is only compatible with exactly one kernel ABI. Thus you need one binary nvidia package for each kernel you ship.
Arch also has one package for every kernel ABI they ship: nvidia and nvidia-lts.
Though it should be noted that their design assumes that these two ABIs are the only possible ABIs which isn’t strictly the case as the zen, hardened or RT variants may sometimes lag behind their regular counterpart. That’s a stupid design if anything as it increases the friction of kernel ABI upgrades as a kernel package maintainer.
We at NixOS also ship the nvidia module for each of our ~50 kernel variants; all major versions of the Nvidia module compatible with that kernel in fact.
The only possible way to access these nvidia kernel modules is via a certain kernel’s linuxPackages attribute set that contains all packages that rely on a kernel ABI such as kernel modules or packages like perf. That’s good design if you ask me but I’m obviously biased ;)
I know you need a new nvidia driver every time the kernel updates, but why keep 50 kernel versions? My beef was them offering so many (outdated) versions instead of keeping the latest one which would make things very simple for users (imo).
These aren’t all versions per se but mostly variants, versions and versions of variants. For example, we have packaged the xanmod kernel which is a modified kernel optimised for desktop use but it has two variants: Main and LTS. We have packaged both.
Here are the names of all of our kernels currently to give you an idea (as a JSON list):
This is useful to have because users might have hardware constraints. It’s not hard to imagine a scenario where a user might have a WiFi chip that only works with kernel ABIs < 5.4 and require the 470 nvidia driver for their old GPU. Packaging just the latest kernel and just the latest Nvidia driver would make this user unable to use their system.
Turns out there’s a different nvidia driver for each kernel version
That is literally every version of Linux out there. IDK what you think was different about Manjaro in that respect. Nvidia hates linux and it’s a tough thing to keep it running, especially on a rolling release. Use the DKMS driver if you’re going to update kernels a lot. At least manjaro seperates the kernel installs from the general updates to minimize this disruption.
I know that these packages are “linked”, and for every kernel update you need a new nvidia driver, I don’t understand though why they keep so many kernel versions in the repo (and their respective nvidia drivers ofc). Just makes things confusing, I assume people generally want the latest kernel the distro has to offer, or if they want something else it’s a different kernel “flavor” like lts, zen, rt, etc.
Mostly misdirected anger from two categories — Arch purists who balk at the notion of someone modding their beloved distro, and newbs who blame Manjaro for issues they create themselves and they would have on any Arch-based distro.
Mostly misdirected anger from two categories — Arch purists who balk at the notion of someone modding their beloved distro, and newbs who blame Manjaro for issues they create themselves and they would have on any Arch-based distro.
Nope not at all. The built in and by Manjaro maintained packagemanager pamac bricks systems. Has not bricked mine since i use pacman instead.
The packages are just the arch packages delayed by a few days which makes it incompatible with the (by default enabled an encouraged to use) AUR.
I haven’t seen this mentioned yet, and there’s a good number of responses so maybe I’m up in the night, but it seems to me Manjaro’s philosophy is somewhat counterintuitive to Arch’s. Arch pointedly obfuscates system internals as little as is reasonable to “keep it simple” from a system perspective. Manjaro simplifies things for the user but creates additional obfuscation. I can see some people who value Arch’s approach being less than amenable to that.
But that’s not a reason to not use it. If Manjaro’s approach appeals to you, use it.
I have been daily driving since 2018 on Manjaro + KDE. In the beginning, considering it is a rolling distro I just update the system every other week and it would break fairly often. But in reality most users really don’t need to do sudo pacman -syyu unless they need certain and specific software update. That’s the great thing about Linux, it is not forcing you to update like Windows update. You do update when you specifically need it and know what you want. There’s barely any serious virus or security exploit for average Linux users. There are many top world supercomputers running on outdated kernels.
If you are not chasing bleeding edge status, and update your Manjaro less regularly, say on par with Linux Mint update schedules of every 6 months or so, then it’ll break less often unless you are really really unlucky.
I wish I was that lucky, the final straw for me was the grub-customizer shenanigans, manjaro pushed an update that broke grub customizer boot entries, then when users were trying to figure it out, they removed grub customizer, and then they even went so far as to make grub conflict with grub-customizer which was really asinine. IIRC they even wound up locking the forum thread on it
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