Just give it a go. I used it for years, and had relatively little issues tbh. Most of them I think are hardware related as I’ll have similar issues in other distros and even windows.
The devs have done some goofs yes. Things like letting certs expire, and as mentioned already, potential issues with aur. But, I remember having aur issues even with vanilla arch in the past.
Using fedora currently though, and I don’t think I’ll switch anytime soon.
Most of the hate is because of the maintainers not maintaining their security certificates. Another similar distro is EndeavourOS, which I personally prefer. But either way, find what works for you.
Just out of curiosity I’ve looked for that a couple of months ago and I found that it’s relatively easy to transform a Manjaro installation to Arch and Endeavor. IIRC it was just adding new repo keys and changing the repos. People attempting that would have to look the guide up for details.
Besides the points made - using their own repos. It kind of defeats an important point of using Arch, if you don’t use the official repos as your main source of packages imo.
It’s a rolling release. You have to let it roll. Arch already has testing repos, there is zero need to test outside of them.
Because they don’t push updates as quickly, which reduces the chances of something slipping through, be it their merit or not. This comes at the expense that it sometimes breaks dependencies and still has close to zero real benefits:
You are better off simply using snapshots. Then you don’t depend on the testing of either party.
Even if the Manjaro devs do to find bugs, they could have found them in Arch Testing as well, which benefits everyone.
I stand by my point that the update strategy is not a feature.
Running Manjaro here. I'm been using Linux exclusively for years, and while I'm not a power user I like to think I'm conversant with it. I've had the odd problem here or there, but honestly not any more than I would expect with any other distro. I picked it because I wanted a rolling release distro that used KDE, and SuSE Tumbleweed didn't want to install that day!
I am currently using Manjaro as my main Laptop OS.
Most of the hate is philosophical based in small often overlookable facts. And how Manjaro uses/is compatible with the AUR. There’s a whole github dedicated to the communities complaints here: github.com/arindas/manjarno
While I can see why many don’t like manjaro, I personally see these complaints as a way to evaluate the company to see if they improve.
My experience with Manjaro is about 1-2 years now. And the OS is very stable, honestly more stable than my brief time with Fedora.
But I did break a lot during that time including my DE. However as long as you are careful on where you install from, the distro will be stable.
Install order
Official Repo - this is delayed by a few weeks to “validate stability”, one of the sticking points for the community
Flatpak
AUR - due to the delayed official packages some AUR packages won’t update immediately, or will cause conflict when they are.
AUR support is honestly the only valid issue with Manjaro. Due to the delay AUR packages will break as older dependencies aren’t being updated causing a large string of removals which can cause stability issued in Manjaro.
My recommendation is to avoid the AUR unless the package isn’t found elsewhere. Which is a problem if you installed Arch for AUR. Thus EndeavorOS is preferred.
But for my usage I prefer the graphical interfaces for all setting. With the exception of GRUB, there is a GUI for everything and you won’t need to touch a terminal.
With that said, you may want to look into OpenSUSE or Fedora/CentOS, and they are similar in terms of GUI settings. And are a little safer since OS level packages are behind another package manager.
But at the cost of less software. For me I’m stuck with Manjaro for now, and as soon as Slimbook battery is officially on Fedora trying that out again.
I have something like 70 AUR packages on Manjaro and doing fine. Yes, they break every once in a while. They break on Arch too.
The thing is, you have to update AUR packages. They’re compiled against a certain system state and they will break eventually as the system updates. This will happen with source packages on any distro. It has nothing to do with Manjaro.
Are you saying that as an Arch user or a Manjaro user? Have you ever used a different Arch distro? I am just wondering how many of the “other Arch distros are just as broken” people have actually used both. I have used several. In my experience, Manjaro stands alone in terms of the number of problems I have had. I guess I am just unlucky.
I’m saying that your problems are with AUR not Manjaro. It’s entirely possible you stumbled across some AUR packages that at a given time didn’t play nice with the official packages. The AUR is huge, it can happen.
But it could have also happened on Arch proper, two weeks earlier, no? The official packages were the same at that time.
I think you were put off Manjaro because it happened while you were on it and if you were to try again it could be different. But once we catch a bias against something it’s hard to revisit it.
I’m biased against Ubuntu and love Debian, for example, even though I realize that my issues with Ubuntu had to do with the way .deb repositories work and could happen with Debian, or that done of the things I disliked were just defaults that I could (and did) change.
Ultimately it’s as much a question of chemistry or vibing with a distro as with anything, and sometimes it helps to move to another distro even if they’re closely related under the hood.
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
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 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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