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.
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.
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?
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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