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!
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
Back when I contributed to ALMA - we'd constantly get issues created by Manjaro users, as it wouldn't work due to Manjaro having the kernel package set up differently IIRC.
I'd just use Arch Linux tbh, it's only painful the first time.
I’d just use Arch Linux tbh, it’s only painful the first time.
Makes sense. There's nothing wrong with vanilla Arch. But may I ask, why should someone use vanilla Arch instead of Arch based like Endevour? Not judging or anything, I'm just not sure if there are any advantages for using vanilla Arch?
Endeavour can also have similar issues due to packaging differences, but it's much rarer. i.e. only these ones are maintained separately - https://github.com/endeavouros-team/PKGBUILDS
But in general it can make getting support a bit harder, that's why I like using more popular distros.
Endavour or arch doesn't really make a difference imo, endavour uses the exact arch repos and only has an extra repo with stuff like AUR helpers, pre-configured DEs and a special script for properly setting up nvidia-dkms drivers.
The main benefit of using/installing arch at least once is that you'll learn quite a bit about the workings of the system. I did a manual arch install a few times and these days I usually just install endavour for the sensible defaults and pre installed QoL packages that I'm too lazy to search for and install on arch.
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.
It is. It's so close that you can out of the box use arch package manager to install packages.
And manjaro package management is technically the same. Just slowed down a little bit.
You could say that arch is "testing" and manjaro "stable".
Although arch is very stable in itself, don't think of it as of Gentoo Unstable.
Rather "manjaro will have the newest kernel after a few months, not tomorrow"
Manjaro is what happens when you have a really nice installer for arch linux and some neat extras; but it's made by people who looked at a 20 minute youtube tutorial about the subject and think they're now the best in their subject even though they barely know how to refresh their own domain name.
if you want an arch-like experience use something like XeroxLinux, arco linux, or EndeavourOS instead, they all have their own place in the arch space and are way better at teaching you how to actually use and maintain your system rather than throw some system at it that will break because it is barely maintained and arch is a rolling release distro.
Brodie Robertson on youtube did a series of videos on the different fuckups by the manjaro team ranging from not refreshing their domain name, DDOS-ing the AUR with their tooling, and pushing broken patches upstream with a rat's ass of knowledge of what's actually going on.
Hmmm, today I got some more information: packaging in-development software as if it were a stable release... without the developers' permission. Also trying to put proprietary software in Manjaro but backing down after the community was upset.
I just switched from Manjaro to endeavor OS. The AUR was just too useful and consistently breaking with Manjaro. The distro overall was fine outside of those issues. But I'm definitely liking endeavor OS a little more. And not just for the AUR. The Manjaro team has had a bit of drama It seems going on inside. They left their domains and certificates laps multiple times. It's definitely not confidence inspiring. But if you only use Manjaro and their repositories it's a pretty decent time.
I have heard things previously about Manjaro that make me want to avoid it.
OTOH, as an Arch user, some of the things I feel could use improvement are better with Manjaro. Pretty much every Arch derivative does something about the major pain points of Arch, though, slapping on a installation gui (though, honestly, just advertising the archinstall CLI script that's on the install usb stick and fixing it up a bit would help Arch), and giving you an AUR helper by default.
I recently tried the XFCE version of Endeavor in a vm, and I quite like it, so if I move from Arch, I'm more inclined to go that direction.
Personally, what I'd say to do is make the install live usb boot to an actual desktop environment, with an icon for running a normal graphical setup to install it... but also icons for a terminal, gparted, and the install docs, so you can do it via a command prompt if you want, though with the ability to see the docs while typing, copy and paste, use a gui to partition your drive, and such...
Manjaro was the first Linux distro I used as a daily driver, from October 2020 to July 2021, when I switched to EndeavourOS. To be fair the main reason I switched was all those previous mess-ups by the developers and the troubled past, which I didn't know of when I moved to Linux. In the year or so I used it, I didn't have any messed update or crash myself.
I would say it's still a fine distro for beginners who want to try a rolling release (as EndeavourOS is imho better in every way, but it doesn't come with any GUI package manager so I wouldn't call it a distro for absolute beginners), but can't see any other usage case, as it's especially risky if you want to use packages from the AUR.
I've been using Manjaro for years and find it to be a solid distro to do your daily stuff. Running it with KDE on Wayland and its super smooth. Pretty much keep it up to date often and use pamac to update instead of pacman and things tend to go well.
It is ultimately your choice, but from the many instances of poor communication, carelessness or whatever it was, I can't personally recommend it.
Even from a new user viewpoint they are often not helpful, reverting to rtfm, something that is expected on base arch, but not on something that supposedly wants to be preinstalled on hardware.
I wish them the best and hope that the ship eventually sails without hiccups.
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.
It's fine. Sometimes an update breaks the stuff installed via aur, that's fixable by issuing a command like that:
yay -S $(pacman -Qoq /usr/lib/python3.11) --answerclean All
Otherwise it works rocksolid. I've got it for 2 years on my thinkpad and no issues. Are there better Arch like distros? Probably. Would I choose another distro like Endeavour OS when I have to make fresh install? Probably. But until then, its okay.
As good as Arch but with a little more hand-holding. Graphical installation, package manager in tray out of the box and not the most bleeding edge versions.
At home, where it's ok to once a year spend some time googling what went wrong and I'd be installing from command line anyway (my $HOME remembers a few other distros and is very fragmented), I use Arch.
For mom's, grandma's and work computers, where I want to just hit update and be done, I use Manjaro.
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
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
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.
I tried it on bare metal some years ago. The main issue I had was that it wasn’t very stable and I kept running into bugs that made the system hard to use. I’m sure they have fixed that by now but that was my experience.
I used it for a while. It's actually not that bad, but they made some really unprofessional blunders in the past and interacting with their main contributors is not very pleasant in my personal experience.
In the end it is mostly just Arch for noobs and it shows.
I liked it but I had issues with changing versions of libraries for development. Sometimes I couldn't run older versions of some code so I had to go back to Debian.
Manjaro had a rough history of not taking security seriously. I hope they have improved, but the impression stuck.
They have done a few things right by making Arch more approachable when Arch was more of a RTFM type distribution. Now Arch is easier and even ships with an installer, but Manjaro's installer is easy.
The end result is still that the user still needs to manage an Arch distro. I would recommend learning the Arch way from Arch instead of taking the easy road.
If you want an easy distro, rolling releases, and up-to-date packages, I would recommend Debian Did over Manjaro. If you want Arch, use Arch.
It all depends, it's not just the installer which makes it different than Arch, also the configurations (on Arch/Artix for many things to work, or safe configs, you actually need to do a lot of tweaks, whereas I understand Manjaro should work mostly out of the box with sane configs that should work in most regular users). As someone mentioned, for people not used to dealing with configurations, starting their experience with gnu+linux, perhaps Manjaro is the option, and then they can explore Arch/Artix.
I see some people say Manjaro has no place--to just use Arch or some other easier to use distro. IMO the more linux distros the better. I think many believe that more distros means its harder to get support, but using linux is also about being resourceful, and many things other distro communities have solved can be utilized in other distros.
Innovations that Manjaro makes can have an impact on their upstream, and the linux community as a whole. It fills a niche that might get someone to use linux that otherwise wouldn't. At the end of the day what helps out all of the linux community is the number of users.
@IUsedTo Recently migrated from Manjaro > Arch > NixOS.
I enjoyed Manjaro! Ignoring some of the issues outlined in other resources (one in this thread) which are completely valid, I think its a good way to get involved in the arch/arch-based space. I felt it was very easy to setup and get running. Most of the software support seemed pretty great and it was relatively snappy. I had no issues during my time (although I didn't need to use the AUR) and would definitely recommend it to others considering it.
I like the idea and used Manjaro for a few years, but its run by less competent people than Id like (or at least in comparison to other distros), so I stopped and moved to a different distro.
Mostly negative. My experience using the distro was very short and quiet some time ago. I found it very buggy and unpolished, and it ended up broken by itself on both my desktop and laptop. I wanted to switch to a more bleeding edge distro after spending 9 years with Debian. After that I found a new home with Fedora.
Ive started out on linux as a Manjaro user, and I still think it's a great beginner distro, pamac (add/remove software app) being one of the most useful things which im glad it came preinstalled.
But there are great frustrations about using the aur as half of the packages wont build, so I dont think it will give new users a good arch experience at all as they are just so annoying, new users should opt for endeavour instead of manjaro.
Also I dont think i would the manjaro team to not screw up things and cause issues such as shipping a broken kernal or whatever they do after the lastest drama, so I dont think I will ever get back to it when there are better arch based distros
manjaro was my way in to arch. i used the fully configured xfce version, then several versions of the minimal install until i got something i liked, and didn't break after a couple of weeks.
if you were to ask me for a recommendation on an arch based distro i'd say endeavour, but manjaro is perfectly fine.
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.
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.
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.
I have a love/hate relationship with Manjaro which boils down to its packages.
I love how pretty much everything is configurable in a GUI. Need to install an older kernel, there's a GUI for it. Need to enable Flatpak or AUR in your package manager, its a toggle switch.
What I don't like is the delayed packages since it messes with AUR. On my machine the Intel Compute Run time keep conflicting with its own dependency. I tried to fix it by installing from AUR, but that didn't fix everything.
Then as I was trying for fix it again I accidentally uninstalled something from the desktop dependency and I couldn't log back into the desktop environment. Thankfully unlike in Windows I was able to get a terminal up and backup my files.
Manjaro lasted 1 year on my machine and was very good. Especially for games. But for my needa I needed something more stable, and a lot more idiot proof (bare minimum separate the games from the os packages).
Moved to Fedora and been loving it. Sure it took I think a month for my DX12 games to work again in Proton, but I can't uninstall OS packages from Discover or Software.
I ran it in a virtual once and liked it well enough.
The main difference I can see between Arch and Manjaro so far is I can install Manjaro and get a bootable system. :-) So far Arch has defeated me. My most recent attempt was with archlinux-2022.12.01-x86_64.iso (twice). The image sits in my temp dir mocking me.
I've been almost exclusively using that distro for a near decade and it's not bad on its own in my experience. Pamac is the best graphical package manager experience I've had as a user. Official, AUR and Flatpak packages all in one place. Manjaro's graphical kernel manager is also nice to have and saved my ass a couple times on my HP laptops that had less than desirable support. I'm definitely looking to move to something else, but it's always ended up being more of a hassle than it was worth. I'm moving in a couple weeks, so I'll use that as an excuse to try switching to EndeavourOS. 🤷♀️ But I personally have no bone to pick with Manjaro.
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)
Personally I use it when I need to spin up a medium to long term virtual machine.
It's fast to set up, it's fresher than a debian based one and you can easily "get dirty" with off the beaten path choices, if you want. Having easy access to the AUR is really a great plus too.
I would never use it as my main distro or as a real OS on the HDD, tho. For that it's just better to use Arch directly, and with the "new" installer it's relatively fast and painless too.
I feel it has its place as a middle ground for someone that wants to learn more about using linux, but who is not really ready to leave the comfort of having an opinionated preassembled experience.
I love it. Been daily driving for about 3 years and haven't looked back.
I call it the 'Windows' of Linux distros because of its relentless focus on practical usability.
As you said, it's ready out off the box but most arch user dont want so many packages (like me) and change to a lighter OS like endeavour or so. It doesnt comes with all preinstalled so i can decide myself if i need it. And there where some mistakes that the dev team made (pushing the false kernel or so) which made some user quit
Back then, the community was much better and the distro was perfectly alright for everyone who wants Arch-based distro but without the complexity of setting up Arch.
In 2017, Vulcan moved to mainline Arch, not due to the community but because of personal desire to try and learn Arch the Arch way. Antergos and now EndeavourOS have less development drama, so Vulcan now recommends it instead of Manjaro.
I've used manjaro for a while and I liked it. But I wanted a more custom setup so I switched to Arch after being on the testing branch for a while.
Manjaro has some nice gui tools e.g. to make installing kernels easier.
There was some drama about Manjaro repeatedly letting there websites certificates expire which shouldn't happen more than once. And they shipped features for M1 macs that weren't anywhere ready without talking with Asahi developers.
But Manjaro is a solid distro. A friend uses Manjaro for years without major problems.
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.
Been testing it for a week now. The installation was straightforward and I like the UI in Settings for changing kernels, mhwd is an easy tool for gfx drivers, etc. I install stuff either with pacman or flatpak and it's a very good experience. I do miss the integration with btrfs/snapshots from SuSE Tumbleweed though. One downside with TW was it couldn't display Twitch videos until I reinstalled some media libs from another repository, that stuff worked out of the box with Manjaro. But that's minor.
I'll probably go back to SuSE TW some day, but it'll be a while as I won't bother reinstalling for now. Everything works well, it's a good and slick distrib.
It's still too arch-y for me. I ran it for a while and got pretty common breaking updates. No I will not read and understand changelogs on the forum every week.
Tough position for me on this. Manjaro is so far, the only distro that works 100% out of the box with my weird sorta-niche Thinkpad model.
I've tried 10+ other distros and they all have had various issues on that laptop except Manjaro, idk why.
I don't use it anymore simply because of all the problems the Manjaro team has had over the last several years. Other posters here have gone into much more detail on it.
Makes me sad though because I really liked my experience with it. Had it on the laptop for over 3 years and it was pretty much flawless that whole time. Every other distro I try has acted janky in some way or another.
I doesn't deserve the hate it gets, it's not that big of a project but it's being treated like it pushed kids to kill themselves, the devs fucked up a few times and made some questionable decision (freeoffice...) but they put upe a nice working distro and aren't completely insane like the gnome/ubuntu devs
Irresponsible devs, delayed packages for no reason causing massive issues with ours and quite often invalid site certificates due to neglect. It's just arch but worse since it uses their repo which delays packages for practically no reason causing aur incompatibilities. Endeavour is a far better distro for beginners (or arch install script) with the exception of it not having pamac preinstalled.