this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023
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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!

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I heard that the maintainers let some important web certificates expire, which is a big no-no.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I enjoy Manjaro and I would even say its the reason I switched to linux (I didn't like the other distros) but I've had updates that brick my operating system however this isnt so much of a problem for me now since i back up my data and use timeshift now.

I think most of the Manjaro hate comes from people comparing it to arch linux

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

i used manjaro for a while but endeavour felt a lot more stable when i switched, im on nobara now though

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I installed Manjaro sometime during 2018, and I have been using it without any major issues. The only issue I had is when AUR packages fail to update. I find that most of the time the issue will resolve itself eventually anyway. Overall, I feel that Manjaro is a nice and stable distro.

The only negative I can think of is the community. At the time, I was bluntly told to read the manual whenever I needed help or pointers. But, my negative experience was from a few years ago, so hopefully the community has improved today.

My daily driver distro today is Mint, which I think is more polished than Manjaro.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I use Manjaro ARM on my Orange PI because I couldn't get Arch ARM to work on it, while Manjaro has support of my devices out of the box. Since I installed a minimal possible version (without any DE), it doesn't feel bloated or something. It feels like I'm using Arch but with slower updates. Overall, it's good and I don't notice much difference from Arch. But anyway, I haven't tried it for a desktop station.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I don't know. I don't feel right if not arch like something missing

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

This site gives some reasons: https://manjarno.snorlax.sh/

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

In my opinion, people should just use Arch with the archinstall script if they need help or EndeavourOS for an easy GUI installer.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I heard some security issues with it, can't confirm.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I ran Manjaro for a year or so. It works well and the default theming looks great but I don't really see a point to the distro really. It's basically just Arch from a couple weeks ago with no AUR support.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

It has AUR support. I use both Manjaro and AUR

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I used to as well and it always caused issues. AUR packages are not designed to be used with Manjaro packages, stuff can break and updates get funky. That's why Manjaro disables it by default.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Manjaro was my intro to Linux, but now that I know more about it, I can't recommend it in good conscience. Letting their SSL certs expire is something that happens (even though they could automate it), but telling their users to change their clocks so it works is a big no-no.

Worse than that is how they manage packages from upstream. Simply freezing them for two weeks is, in my opinion, the worst of both worlds. You don't get timely security updates, but you still end up with the issues of being on the bleeding edge - just late. It also means that if you use the AUR (which is really one of the biggest perks of Arch-based systems), it's possible that the necessary dependencies are out of date.

I think that if one wants "Arch with an installer" they should go with EndeavourOS, or try the archinstall script.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Simply freezing them for two weeks

That's not what they're doing at all. That dumb myth needs to die.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Can you expand on this? A source would be great here to properly debunk this.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Sure. When it comes to updates, Manjaro is pretty much doing what every single other distro is doing. Updates that are buggy don't get pushed to the stable branch until they're fixed up, and security updates tend to get pushed through faster than feature updates. The time period that updates get held up by is not a fixed duration, it depends on the specific package and update and can be anywhere between a few days and a few weeks.

As a concrete example, with some major Plasma updates Manjaro has waited for three or even four point releases (4 / 8 weeks) before considering it stable enough vs the newest point release of the previous major release, and following point releases after that get pushed to stable much faster.

As another point, even Arch has a very similar process... Their policy on pushing updates is far more geared towards pushing updates quickly than towards not breaking things, but otherwise it's pretty much the same.

Idk about a source on this stuff though. There's stuff like https://wiki.manjaro.org/index.php/Switching_Branches but I don't know anything better.

Manjaro packages start their lives in the unstable branch. Once they are a deemed stable, they are moved to the testing branch, where more tests will be realized to ensure the package is ready to be submitted to the stable branch

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Never used it, but in my mind it will always be the distribution that told its users to roll the date on their machines back because they forgot to renew their website's SSL certificate.

Twice.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago

I've been using it for nearly 3 years and encountered minimal issues. I'm using it on a Lenovo E14 all AMD laptop, mostly for gaming and web browsing.

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