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...
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.