Manjaro 2.0 Synopsis This document covers the organizational, technical, management, and other changes we (the Manjaro Team, et al) like to see applied to the Manjaro Project. The goal of this document is to serve as a point of discussion, and ultimately, once a consensus on its contents and written goals has been reached, as a guide for the organizational restructuring of the Manjaro Project. Motivation The Manjaro Project has been declining over the past decade. It managed to sustain a sizabl...
just stop using manjaro and move on, seriously
I’ve been using Manjaro for years without issue.
It is the best distro for my needs.
What do you see as its advantage(s) over other Arch derivatives?
literally impossible, even if it was run by competent people (it isn’t) its design fundamentally caters to no-one
want easy arch? Cachyos, endeavoros
are those too hard? Fedora, aurora, bazzite
The current design of slowing down arch breaks more things than it solves and just results in a significantly harder to fix setup.
the only people who like manjaro haven’t tried anything else and haven’t really thought about their distros philosophies at all, or just got really unlucky with other distros. There’s literally no reason to use this distro that isn’t just that you’re already used to it. That’s not even factoring in that the distro is a net negative for the community (see: ddosing the aur)
Neither CachyOS nor EndeavourOS get out of the way same as Manjaro. CachyOS doesn’t even ship with app store by default, which is an immediate yuck for someone who needs a “just conveniently works out of the box” distro.
Manjaro is the only Arch derivative that allows you to never even think you have Arch under the hood. It has all sorts of QoL improvements and graphical settings for everything, it has a smooth and beautiful integration of all package sources (something Arch is notoriously bad with), and if you don’t need AUR, package delay prevents breaking changes, helping you not to think about managing your system.
Manjaro is not for everyone, and it will definitely not satisfy a typical Arch demographic, as it’s made with different people in mind. Hence such an opinionated take on your side. Recent management issues don’t help, either, but that’s exactly what they’re trying to take action against.
In any case, it was Manjaro that served as my gateway to Linux, and it couldn’t have been smoother. No other distro I played around made me feel confident in switching.
My recommendation for someone that needs an appstore with a gui is fedora, manjaro is terrible for this, because they have an appstore that regularly breaks and requires cli intervention anyway, if having a gui for package management is important to you manjaro is a terrible choice, as is arch in general.
read some of the comments here, this is not uncommon, and it’s a fundamental issue with the design of arch package management that has been completely resolved elsewhere.
No, I do not agree at all that that is a valid usecase for manjaro. Anybody who needs a distro that works out of the box and is convenient shouldn’t even be considering anything arch based.
Fedora is way more involved than Manjaro, and I wouldn’t recommend it to newbies.
First time I touched Fedora (that was 1,5 years into my Linux journey), I immediately borked it very hard when trying to install Nvidia drivers. For about a year that I used it since, it has shown itself as a generally stable, but involved distro that allows the user to shoot themselves in a foot and doesn’t shy away from turning folks to terminal. So, it’s decent for experienced users, but it’s certainly not for everyone, and especially not for newbies.
So, what do you propose for newbies? Ubuntu, with all its dumpster fire? Mint, that, for all its merits, stubbornly refuses modern frameworks? Debian, that will have a newbie drown in documentation? Manjaro isn’t perfect, and there are negatives to write about it as well, but it relies on Arch for good reasons that are often omitted. Arch is truly community-based, rolling release, highly supported, and very fast, which allows to bring all the recent niceties of Linux to any and all machines, no matter how close they are to the potato and how new the user is to the ecosystem.
you’re right, I oversimplified, bazzite is great because it’s unhindered by patents and preinstalls the drivers, I’d recommend a community fedora fork, the key being that it’s much easier to turn fedora into this than arch.
manjaro is this but with way more footguns, I say this having maintained a bunch of manjaro systems for people, switching them to bazzite fixed nearly all of my maintenance burden, because it’s easy to remove them from fedora but impossible with arch, intentionally, and by design.
If you want something easy that just works arch is very deliberately designed to not be that, on purpose, even.
Bazzite is good indeed, we can agree here. My main issue with it is exactly what makes it good for many - namely, immutability.
On the upside, it does indeed remove a lot of footguns. It’s much harder to actually bork your immutable install (although it is possible, I did once manage to cause seemingly irreversible damage to Aurora, which is another Fedora-based immutable).
On the downside, it takes different approaches to management and system administration compared to regular mutable distros. This makes troubleshooting more complicated, as a lot of general Linux solutions just won’t work. Also, some things still stubbornly refuse to work on an immutable distro. I recognize a lot of this is growing pains, but they are currently there.
Currently, I strike a good balance with OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. It is exceptionally stable for a rolling release distribution, it is mutable, and at the same time, it has extensive automatic snapshots and easy recovery. So, whatever you manage to break, you can roll it back. Still, I wouldn’t recommend it to newbies in my right mind, because, just like Fedora, it still expects the user to know what they’re doing, and is quite terminal-intensive. Maybe it could be forked into something newbie-friendly, and it would make a strong rival to Manjaro.
There’s one more aspect for me personally, though. Debian and Arch are the only two upstreams that are:
Debian has a very slow release schedule, and as I do appreciate more frequent updates, I’m pretty much squeezed into Arch territory. And in there, Manjaro comes with least technical expertise expected of the user, and with the most user-friendly approach. And if not for some weird issues I have with all Arch distros on my particular machine, I would consider running Manjaro to this day.
Oh, and on the impossibility of removing footguns from Arch: KDE actually works on immutable Arch, which must be very low-maintenance, so we’ll see how it goes.
Look, I’ve used more different OSes than I can remember. I used everything from CP/M to Solaris. I’ve used Microsoft Xenix, HP-UX, OS/2, Haiku, BSDs, you name it. I’ve used Slackware, Knoppix, Tom’s RootBoot, Puppy Linux, Debian, RedHat Linux (not RHEL, the original), Corel Linux, Mandrake, Caldera.
I love weird OSes and their history. I think I have enough knowledge to jump ship when a distro is giving me a hard time. I use Debian on all servers, Xubuntu or Kubuntu (de-SNAPed, of course) on desktops. But my personal laptop is running Manjaro for years now because it works, stays fresh, and gets out of my way.
That’s normal most distros do that, what does manjaro do better than others? You have not made any sort of case for why manjaro is better.
you fall under “haven’t thought about distros philosophies”
you did not actually compare anything, what you discovered is that manjaro works… but so does everything else so that’s not a valid comparison, usless you can point to distros that don’t work and why
You framed is as a non ideal philosophy. But acknowledging the things slowing down breaks and taking the time to make a calculated step so things don’t break anyway when updating can be appealing. I see it as a slightly faster stable. Inefficient maybe, but that’s just a difference in values. In practice it sounds like this hasn’t worked for some, guess I’ve been lucky. There maybe be other distros that do this better now, I couldn’t tell you, but from a, comparing philosophical differences point of view, Manjaro seems like an option.
If you want slightly faster stable then you probably want something like https://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Slowroll
which does exactly that but has a competent team backing it.
or even fedora, really.
I’m glad I’ve learned to ignore people like you.
But you kinda didn’t.
Tell me why I’m wrong.