I am a Linux noobie and have only used Mint for around six months now. While I have definitely learned a lot, I don’t have the time to always be doing crazy power user stuff and just want something that works out of the box. While I love Mint, I want to try out other decently easy to use distros as well, specifically not based on Ubuntu, so no Pop OS. Is Manjaro a possibly good distro for me to check out?
if you want an Arch based distro, Endeavour OS is more popular – Manjaro has had a few issues over the years
Just switched to EndeavourOS about a week ago from Manjaro and been liking it so far.
Biggest reason for the change was my manjaro install was getting cluttered, and moving over to a new distro ( taking all my previous knowledgement with it) has been a blessing.
Beforehand, my Manjaro install was EFI, whereas my Windows 11 drive ( yes I know) was UEFI so switching on boot was an issue. Now both are on UEFI and show up within Grub.
Endeavor OS has bluetooth turned off by default. Thought there was an issue but nope.
So from no issues with updating, even with AUR turned on.
I just like starting fresh and setting things up with all my previous knowledge.
thanks to the archinstall tool it’s very easy to install arch the way you want to
it’s much lighter than Manjaro and has been very stable for me
I have used it in the past for a few years. I don’t think you should. Why?
- The Manjaro devs are idiots. They have broken the AUR on multiple occasions.
- Their packages break more often than upstream Arch since you get update bundles which they release. This isn’t tested as well as it should and may lead to things breaking.
- Arch is also easier to install nowadays, if you really want a rolling release distro.
If you just want something not-Ubuntu and easy to use, I tend to favor Fedora personally.
I agree completely.
As a sidenote: If somebody wants something easy-to-use that is arch-based I’d suggest EndevaourOS.
What even is an unbiased opinion? That doesn’t even begin to make sense.
That being said, my very biased opinion is that it’s a great way to install Arch without learning how Arch works so that when it inevitably breaks you don’t even know how to ask the right questions.
“Unbiased opinion” is an oxymoron.
As an Arch user this is how I feel about Manjaro as well. Installing Arch not only allows you to customize every aspect from the shell to the DE and more but also teaches you how to maintain and fix your OS when it breaks.
The best Arch-based distro is Arch.
I disagree. Not everyone wants to spend the time to completely customize their system. Distros like Manjaro and Endeavor give people a decent “just works” install while still giving them experience with the Arch ecosystem. The forums are usually a good resource, and everything on the arch wiki still applies. It might just be because I had previous linux experience, but I’ve learned a lot running Manjaro.
The average person is not going to jump straight into vanilla Arch as their first distro, but after a couple years with Manjaro, they might try it.
If you don’t want to spend the time to completely customize your system just don’t use an Arch based system. Seriously. Arch has some neat things about it, but it’s not the magical be all and end all of distros. If you don’t want to use what it’s good at use Mint, or Debian, or PopOS, or Ubuntu, or Fedora, or if you want something bleeding edge use OpenSuse Tumbleweed. You don’t have to use shitty imitation Arch if you don’t want to use Arch. You also don’t need experience with Manjaro to use Arch. I jumped straight into Arch after using Mint for years and it was fine. I still use Mint on my laptop and as a backup on my old drive I moved to my new computer just in case I do something stupid in Arch. Mint is great. I just like playing around with completely customizing my system. Why would you want something Arch based if you don’t care about the main thing it’s actually good at?
To answer your question: AUR. Aur is something that I love about Arch.
Also please stop gatekeeping. Installing Arch by hand instead of using something like EndevaourOS doesn’t mean anything. I used EndevaourOS after using arch simply because it was way faster and easier to configure. It still has all the functionality of arch (since essentially it is arch).
If you don’t want to spend the time to completely customize your system just don’t use an Arch based system
Thats the thing. You can still customize everything and anything. I mean what’s stopping you from using a tty and changing things? Also even the installer helps you customize a lot of things…
I’m not gatekeeping. Arch isn’t fucking magical. Do whatever you want. I just actually don’t get it. What’s the point? I don’t even use the AUR. It’s not that good. It’s an inconsistent mess of janky conflicting build scripts and trust me bro binaries, and you can get basically anything there in almost any distro nowadays. Hell, most of it’s on Flathub. You can also customize anything you want on any distro. Arch is just the easiest one to start from a very minimal system and build something up that’s totally yours. Why use a distro that only takes that away and adds nothing?
I agree Arch isn’t magical. And I’m more than aware of the issues with the AUR, however i disagree that everything on there can be found by other means. There are several programs (such as optimus-manager for nvidia and integrated video card laptops) which are pretty much only found on the AUR (Not counting Github). Again this is about ease-of-use (Since you could build my example from github as well).
Obviously you can customize anything anywhere, what sets Arch apart is pacman and aur. And again in the case of Manjaro and EndeavourOS these and the wiki are the main “selling points”.
Arch is just the easiest one to start from a very minimal system and build something up that’s totally yours
Minimal ubuntu and fedora exists as well. And if you were to customise them you’d end up with something that you like as well. But i see what you are saying and i agree.
There are several programs (such as optimus-manager for nvidia and integrated video card laptops) which are pretty much only found on the AUR
As a person who uses Davinci Resolve, I can safely say that the AUR version is probably the easiest way to get it on a non-CentOS/RHEL distro. The AUR is still one of the biggest draws to Arch for me.
There are certainly still a few edge cases where the AUR is the least shitty option, and if those apply to you then go for it, but my experience has always been that the more I use it, the worse my experience gets, and everything I need has had better options for a while now, and those edge cases where it even makes sense are rapidly dwindling. But yes, I was exaggerating how bad it is. There are still more than just a few uses for it. EndeavorOS is maybe okay if you want that without having to install Arch, but Manjaro messes with things enough that it’s not as compatible with the AUR as it likes to pretend to be.
And yeah, I agree, there are lots of ways to build up your own system. You can do it with any distro if you’re determined enough, and there are other decent options besides just Arch. I just find Arch to be the easiest one to do it with, and I like easy. It’s maybe counter-intuitive to say, but I like Arch specifically because it makes the things I want to do easier than any other distro does.
Personally, I think the idea that you can’t ask the right questions because you haven’t installed Arch manually is a silly notion that’s borderline gatekeeping. It’s why Arch users have the reputation that they do and why Arch itself has a reputation for being difficult even though it really isn’t.
Over the years, I’ve moved from Manjaro to Antergos to Endeavor, and then finally the official
archinstalltool. I probably will never be arsed to install Arch by hand, but it doesn’t mean that when something breaks I don’t know how to consult the Arch Wiki and fix it myself.Do users of other distros not know how to ask the right questions? Are Arch users the only ones who know their system inside and out? I don’t think so. Every person has their own threshold for how much investment they want to make into learning about their system, no matter the distro.
The reason Arch users all end up like this is that we’ve all tried to help someone, been run around for hours, and then finally figured out that the problem is caused by some stupid thing that Manjaro did despite the person insisting the whole time that they’re using Arch and there’s literally nothing we could do to help, only to be called an elitist gatekeeper for trying to point it out because “It’s the same thing.” Fuck that, and fuck you for calling me a gatekeeper.
If you want to use Arch use Arch. You are welcome to use it. It’s not actually hard. If you can read a wiki, you can install Arch. It’s not a fucking herculean task that only super-geniuses can manage. I get it. Some people’s brains don’t mesh with the wiki style of information presentation, and that’s okay. That doesn’t make you inferior or unintelligent, but if you think the Arch wiki is good for other things then you can just install it in an afternoon. I promise. And you’ll learn more in that afternoon than you learn in a year of using Manjaro. Seriously. I’m not kidding.
If that’s not what you want, there are almost certainly other distros that are way, waaaaaaay better for you than any Arch-based distro is. I can’t actually stop anyone from using Manjaro, or Endeavor, or whatever else they want to use, and I wouldn’t want to be able to. I’m not in charge of your life. If you want to do something stupid you should be able to make that choice. I just want to point out how stupid it is. Is that so wrong?
You simultaneously complain that you’re being called an elitist gatekeeper and in the same damn breath call everyone else who doesn’t share your opinions of Arch-purism stupid. That is a textbook example of gatekeeping dude.
The reason Arch users all end up like this is that we’ve all tried to help someone, been run around for hours, and then finally figured out that the problem is caused by some stupid thing that Manjaro did
This is a made up situation. I am an Arch user and I have never been so incensed about derivative differences that I felt the need to restrict help to only pure Arch users like I am running some product support hotline. Please, give me a break. Why do we have to be so damned picky about who we help? There’s always going to be differences between my system and another person’s system which can make debugging confusing, even between two separate pure-Arch systems, but that’s part of the fun! And so what if they’re using Manjaro? A ton of problems in the Linux space are distro-agnostic and more due to wrong configuration, etc. If you don’t want to help them, that’s fine, just move on instead of pretending like their entire community committed some cardinal sin against you. Can RHEL users not help out Fedora users? What about Ubuntu vs Mint? Is it really so damned hard to be like “Hey, I can’t figure out your problem. It could be that there’s some differences between Arch and Manjaro” and just move on with your life?
It’s fine if you don’t want to contribute to these kinds of things, but insisting Arch-derivative users stop using them and or be shunned from interaction is gatekeeping to be perfectly frank. There are many reasons why some people might prefer an Arch-derivative. Just because you can’t see them doesn’t make them any less valid for other people who have different usecases and preferences than you.
I can’t fucking help a Manjaro user if Manjaro just broke an AUR package by having the wrong version of a dependency. It’s not that I don’t want to help. It’s that somebody lied to me for hours while I was trying to help them, and then when I tried to explain why I couldn’t they started spewing the exact same bullshit name calling that you’re using right now. If thinking that’s a bad thing that should be avoided makes me a “gatekeeper” to you then fine. I’ll wear that gatekeeper badge with pride. We all do stupid things sometimes, I’m just trying to help people who will listen do it less. If you think that means I’m calling you stupid, that’s your opinion.
Go fuck yourself. I’m done with this conversation.
It’s that somebody lied to me for hours
So you let one person define your opinion of an entire community and distro? Mmm okay.
they started spewing the exact same bullshit name calling that you’re using right now
If multiple people are calling you out on your behavior, then maybe its time to look inward instead of being so defensive. Just look at this convo. Right off the bat you’ve called an entire community stupid for having preferences different than you, shat on a distro you don’t even use as your daily driver, and then told me to go fuck myself twice. This is just classic “I am not wrong, everybody else is wrong” behavior. Check your toxicity dude.
In my entire life it’s happened twice and you think that’s proof that I’m the problem, and not just that I’ve met two assholes in 45 years? Sure dude.
So you admit that it’s super rare you encounter these bad Manjaro users that have offended you so much, and then decide to make generalizations about the entire Manjaro community and the distro? Yes, you absolutely ARE the problem.
Let me put it this way. If in real life you went into a crowd of people, called them all stupid for being there, and told a few of them to go fuck themselves, you would get punched in the face. Just because you’re on the Internet doesn’t make this kind of behavior okay.
From this comment thread, I can already tell you simply don’t understand why anyone would use a computer in a different way than you do. It’s absolutely fine to be opinionated about how you want to run your personal machines, but to tell others so vehemently that they’re wrong for wanting a different computing experience other than the one you’ve “deemed” correct…well that’s just silly.
It’s not wrong for someone to want something in between, say for example Fedora or Ubuntu, and Arch. Heck, the reason why so many Arch-derivatives exist is because a lot of people want it. You telling other people that they either go full-Arch or they’re stupid IS gatekeeping.
This is a great explanation of the frustration that Arch users have supporting Manjaro users. The problem is a subtle error in the lesson learned. It is not that Arch is uniquely better. It is that Manjaro uniquely sucks.
The idea of Manjaro is great. It is just poorly executed ( but well enough that you have to use it for quite some time to understand that ).
Other Arch derivatives do not have these issues.
Idiot Devs that forgot to renew their certificates twice in a single year. A pm that can break your packages. A treasurer hat gotbfires cause he didnt allow the CEO to buy a 2k gaming laptop. They fiddled with arch so much there is a chance when something goes wrong, its likely manjaros fault.
They are not to be trusted frankly.
Use endeavouros, it makes arch actually usable Instead of a KISS nightmare and doesn’t have any of the manjaro baggage.
Don’t forget that on 3 separate occasions they literally DDOSed the AUR
I never recommend Manjaro, even for experienced users. Multiple times, they’ve let their ssl certificats expire, and renewing those has been easy to automate for a number of years at this point. There have been a number of cases where they ship work-in-progress versions of software as part of their default install, and there was an open letter posted calling this out: https://dont-ship.it
So in my opinion, Manjaro leaves much to be desired from a project governance standpoint.
Now, using an Arch-based distro that does the install process for you doesn’t absolve you from learning what it takes to maintain an Arch install; at some point, something will crop-up that requires manual intervention to get back up & running again after an update.
If that is what you’re looking for, I suggest EndeavourOS.
if you want to use Arch, just use Arch
I love arch as much as the next guy but it can be a bit of a bugger to install. It’s reasonable to want a little more simplicity with all of the benefits of arch.
Look up Calam Arch Installer. It’s an installer ISO for Arch (using official Arch repos) that uses the Calamares installer which is the same installer Manjaro uses. It makes Arch easy to install, I’ve used it for all my Arch installs.
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I used to love Manjaro. It looks gorgeous ( to my eye ). Sadly, I now see it as a bit of a low-quality mess with governance issues. Manjaro broke my system more than once. Although I did not believe it when I used Manjaro, getting off of it has shown me that I regularly had AUR compatibility problems as well.
These days, I would recommend EndevourOS over Manjaro. It is just as easy in practice, I have found it to be far more stable. Once installed, EndevourOS is 99.8% the same as a well configured vanilla Arch. It uses the Arch package repositories natively.
Even more than Manjaro, I used to love Pamac and graphical package management. Now I think Pamac is garbage. It has caused so many problems for me. I mostly use yay to manage packages now. A really great middle ground between GUI package management and yay or pacman is pacseek. You have to use yay to install it but, for the times I may have missed Pamac, it has been awesome.
I used manjaro for a long while before I distro hopped and I think it’s a fine distro. Never had any problems with it. People keep pointing to the couple of times when it had some certificate issues. I don’t think it’s very relevant, and I only had positive things to say while I was using it.
I think Manjaro is a bit of a mixed bag. A good distro in it self but their are issues. Arch is great and a big part of it is due to the AUR. When using the AUR you can easily get dependentie conflics if you use it on Manjaro.
Also some sloppy things from the devs. From adding broken patches (some driver thing). To exidentely ddosing the AUR.
I used to run Manjaro, and I can’t recommend it for a new user. While the UX is user friendly, the distro itself is not. Ive very often had upgrade and update issues that i have wasted days fixing.
I’d instead recommend fedora workstation as a non-ubuntu option
Second Fedora workstation. Spent almost an entire year distro hopping to find a distro that worked out the box with my laptops touch screen. Fedora has been the one - super polished too!
Wouldn’t let it touch my system. Try Endeavor if you want to hop to an arch based distro.
May I ask why?
EndeavorOS was my first desktop distro and it’s a great beginner distro in my opinion. Most stuff is sanely pre-configured and dealing with stuff like Nvidia drivers and Steam is one click away.
From what I heard, Manjaro is very unpolished. The devs do weird stuff with the OS and their decisions are questionable if I’m not wrong. I think Manjaro isn’t as easy and stable as they advertised.
Regarding Endeavor OS, they say it is Manjaro done right.
Manjaro is very “polished” which is why many people that try it ( myself included ) love it and come to recommend it. Unfortunately, it is also low quality and poorly managed which is why many ex-users ( myself included ) would never use it again.
EndevourOS is Manjaro that works. It has no graphical package manager. You can install the one Manjaro uses easy but, sadly, it is unreliable and poor quality ( like Manjaro itself ).
What you hear is probably different from what it actually is like. There’s a lot of Manjaro hate from people who’ve never actually used it as their daily driver and are just parroting what other people online are saying.
I’ve used Manjaro for a year before eventually moving to Endeavour and then Arch. It’s perfectly fine.
Maybe it depends on what packages you use? I used Manjaro for ~2 years before switching to Arch and definitely had more update-related stability problems with Manjaro.
I have a Pine phone convergence edition that came with Manjaro Plasma. I installed it on my PC so I could easily dev for it. Updates twice broke the phone complaining about a login screen lock. On my PC, 2 updates broke it as it wouldn’t start up the DE.
I have used Mint and Kububtu without issue but I don’t like Snaps. I now use OpenSuse as a simple rolling distro.
You may have used without issue, but that is not the experience of others. Devs have complained about them distributing non-master branch features that weren’t sufficiently tested or released and got their issue tracker flooded.
They are a really questionable distro quality wise. One of the worst IMHO, and considering they are aimed at new users, it’s absolutely cruel to use them.
You may love it and great for you, but people won’t give you free reign to advise a bad distro that is going to ruin Linux for newbies when there are better alternatives available.
On my PC, 2 updates broke it as it wouldn’t start up the DE.
Well, did you figure out what caused the issue? There’s many things besides the quality of a distro that could cause this, especially on an Arch or Arch derivative. Many Arch users have complained about their DE occasionally failing to boot up due to some random update that broke something for their specific config. Just saying that this doesn’t prove much. It could have been Manjaro, it could have easily also been a bad upstream update or even PEBKAC.
A few days ago, my standard Arch system upgraded to a version of pipewire-pulse that created duplicate audio devices on every audio profile change. I could have easily just said, “Arch is a shitty distro, they can’t even get audio devices working correctly”, but that would be misleading. Anecdotal statements like yours are too vague to prove a point about any distro.
Devs have complained about them distributing non-master branch features that weren’t sufficiently tested or released and got their issue tracker flooded.
This isn’t an issue specific to Manjaro. This also happens to any upstream project that are shipped by downstream. Many distros ship unofficial patches to upstream software, this is NOT new.
You may love it and great for you, but people won’t give you free reign to advise a bad distro
I don’t use it anymore as I am on regular Arch now, but during my time using Manjaro for about a year, I genuinely didn’t see much issue with it, at least no more than what I’ve been experiencing with Arch. I am just annoyed at how some people had one or two bad experiences and then are just jumping on the hate bandwagon with nothing much to back it up.
There’s a lot of Manjaro hate from people who’ve never actually used it as their daily driver and are just parroting what other people online are saying.
You first insinuate people who bash it, don’t use it, I’ve made it clear I did with clear examples. Now it’s on to blaming the user or expecting users to invest hours and hours to troubleshoot borked installs. Breaking software isn’t, and shouldn’t be the norm. I’ve never had it with Mint or Kubuntu, and before you throw a point about it being rolling distros are more up to date, I’ve been using OpenSuse Tumbleweed for over a year without issue. It hasn’t borked once. Failure rate on Manjaro is higher and when you dig into how they operate, there are clear reasons why.
It seems you were very lucky in your Manjaro days, and now because you somehow avoided getting run over crossing the motorway blindfolded, you think everyone’s experience is like yours.
There isn’t a hate bandwagon, and you don’t need to defend their honour. They are not a sports team you cheer on. They are a software project, and need to improve. You defending poor work just enables it.
The fact you raised points, they were disputed and you moved on to separate points to fit in with the theme of “Manjaro good”, you’re coming across as a Manjaro shill.
You do realize that you’re basically saying your anecdotal experience is better than mine right? So you’re basically doing the same thing you’re accusing me of, thinking that everyone’s experience is like yours. All I asked was whether you actually figured out what the root cause was. From your vague response, I can only surmise you didn’t do the least amount of debugging and decided to blame Manjaro just because. All the other distros you tested on weren’t even Arch-based, so you don’t even have a solid understanding of whether it was actually Manjaro or an Arch issue.
you’re coming across as a Manjaro shill.
Seriously? I am not even using Manjaro anymore as per my post. Just because I am not blindly following the crowd and jumping on hate bandwagons whenever I see one doesn’t make me a shill. Calm yourself.
I’m not a fan for a few reasons, but they’re all on my end.
I will say, though, that if you “don’t have time to always be doing crazy power user stuff,” an Arch based distro might not be what you’re looking for. This is especially true of an Arch based distro that strays pretty far from the core distribution.
My suggestion would be to try Fedora or OpenSuse Tumbleweed instead. I’m a big Fedora fan, and it’s honestly great - much better than Ubuntu IMHO. It’s also easy to maintain and less prone to user-induced breakage than Arch distros.
If you’re looking for something even more different, but still not prone to breakage, then you might try looking into an immutable distro. Silverblue, OpenSuse Aeon, blendOS, or VanillaOS are all nice places to start looking.
I agree with this
I’ve used Arch, Manjaro, and Endeavour. For ease of use it’s between Manjaro and Endeavour and I’d pick Endeavour. Arch is great too. When you’re ready to go deeper, give it a shot.
What is your biased opinion on having unbiased opinions?
You can’t be unbiased.
really? Noooo!!!
I run Manjaro as my gaming rig and have had no real issues.
Me too. 🙌
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It does! But I recently gave Bazzite a try…yeah I’m not ready for this so-called atomic distro (it’s based on Fedora). I’m now, for the moment, settled on Garuda Linux (based on Arch). I’m liking it thus far, but if anything goes awry, I may head back to Manjaro. Garuda is much closer to Arch prime (running 6.8.9 linux-zen kernel where Manjaro is on 6.6.x still). And the chaotic-aur is actually kinda nice. Time will tell if I stick with it!
I’ve had more success with Manjaro than any other distro. I’ve gotten lots of software working because of the great package manager, all using a GUI. I think it’s really easy to use and at the same time really flexible and powerful. I’ve tried to install Arch twice and failed both times. I guess I’m an idiot. Manjaro is easy to install and you get all the power a flexibility of Arch’s package management.
They say that the arch-installer is a great way to install Arch. In case you give it a try again. It’s bundled with the Arch Iso.
I tried it when it first came out but it kept failing due to a bug. I’ve been meaning to try it out again
