this post was submitted on 14 May 2024
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Can you elaborate on why you think they suck? IMO most of the Arch derivates fill very good roles. Arch itself is a nice distro but you can never suit every user, and the derivates do things that Arch itself would never do.
Most importantly I believe there are lots of people who would have never used Arch vanilla but they get to enjoy "second hand Arch" and that's a good thing, isn't it?
My take on the most prominent Arch derivates (forgive me if I forget any, it's off the top of my head):
Pretty much, yeah. Definitely agree with you on that one. I use Manjaro mostly bc im lazy to install regular arch and also bc I actually found that delay in the update cycle to be really good in my case. With regular arch the times I used it broke a lot more than what Manjaro ever did for me, and I'm not that particularly interested in "bleeding edge" that much, but instead I liked arch and arch based distros because of the compatibility and tools I need. The AUR is amazing, and there's tons of custom repos to be added on top of arch which give me said tools I need to use + (yeah im lazy as hell).
So yeah, Manjaro is pretty much a bit of a more stable arch for lazy people, so right up my alley!
I used Manjaro and did not experience at all that it was more stable. For one thing, the packages do not get changed, just delayed. You are just as bleeding edge just not as current. The delay caused wrong packages to be installed, or unable to be installed, from the AUR sometimes. Also, mostly for governance reasons, Manjaro just plain broke more often than Arch.
EndeavourOS just is Arch once it is installed ( especially if you remove eos-hooks which is what makes EOS report as EOS ). Everything on your system ( including the kernel ) comes from the Arch repos. Even the “unique” EOS configuration choices like dracut and systemd-boot come from the Arch repos. EOS adds a handful of optional utilities on top of Arch ( that you may never use ), some theming, and enables the AUR by default ( by installing yay and paru ). Of course, lots is people use these in Arch too.
I'd argue that Manjaro just doesn't implement similar procedures with AUR because it's insanely labor-intensive, all while repos are doing great.
As per the delay - the packages that cause troubles within this 2-week window are not updated until they're fixed, that's why this period exists in the first place.
I've heard a lot of negative experiences around Manjaro, but most commonly they refer to an experience that has been long ago. As a 1,5-year Linux enjoyer who started with Manjaro and keeps to it for the desktop (though I played around with Arch, Endeavour, and currently have Debian on my laptop), I had no serious issues with the distro - except one time Pamac updated the kernel while I turned off PC. For that, yeah, some guardrails wouldn't hurt.
Happy Manjaro user here. "Mommy knows best" approach greatly helps to get onboard with Linux without shooting yourself in the foot.
If I would be offered to start my journey with Arch, I just wouldn't begin this transition to begin with.
And now, I can enjoy a lot of benefits of Arch, be it rolling release, independence, AUR (carefully though), from the comfort of a nice and easy to understand system designed with regular user in mind.
Endeavour is ok I just did like it that much I like that wallpapers
Garuda gave up on it in the installer like the look those jelly window should never be on by default and my ThinkPad Just Said No when I tried to install it I have a t480 I was testing it on there before I put it on my main pc
Manjaro I never got it to work properly just unstable there package installer is worse then discover (discover is not bad I just can't get it working when I install it)
I'm fine with people using arch bases distros I just don't use them and I won't force backs arch on anyone
Can you elaborate what didn't work on Manjaro? Just curious, I've been using it on my gaming rig for over 5 years without problems.
This is not a comment on you as it is a reasonable question but I have wasted too much time arguing with Manjaro fans and I do not want to go down that road again.
To answer the question partially, there were two classes of problem:
1 - governance - this includes the stuff like not renewing certs and not testing core packages. My system became unbootable more than once and one of those times I was not knowledgeable enough to recover and ended up reinstalling ( mostly a skill issue in retrospect ).
2 - package delays - I found more than once that the delay in releasing packages caused problems with the AUR. First, it sometimes meant I could not use AUR stuff because of missing dependencies ( like when that was the only place you could get dotnet - now in extras ). That was frustrating but not destructive. Worse, delays sometimes caused AUR dependencies to get installed instead of ones from extras or community ( because they were not there yet ). This happened with newish software or with packages that had been renamed or refactored. Once the AUR packages had been installed, they would sometimes stay even after the packages appeared in Manjaro repos. Then sometimes the AUR packages would disappear ( be abandoned as they had been moved into the core repos ) and I would end up with packages that would not update because of dependencies or where I would end up using source packages that took forever to build ( because git versions were the only ones available ). I thought all this was just the nature of the AUR until I switched to Arch it stopped happening. I have installed Manjaro since and had it happen again. I do use the AUR heavily.
Sorry, I ended up saying more than I wanted to. I wanted to answer your question but I do not want to argue. Honestly, if Manjaro works for you, I am very happy. If you think I am wrong, that is ok. I wish you luck.
As an outside reader (and Manjaro fan), this absolutely came off as as opinion that doesn't call for arguments.
You did a great job sharing your experience. Heavy AUR users should definitely NOT use Manjaro - even Manjaro devs warn against it.
Hope mainline Arch serves you well!
Thank you for explaining and sharing your journey.
Regarding 1: A system not booting anymore really is a major issue. Maybe I was lucky to not have encountered that, maybe didn't happen because I use a custom kernel. Regarding the certs: Honestly I don't really care about the Manjaro website. The certs of the package repositories are important to me though.
Regarding 2: I'm using the AUR to install some third-party applications like "gpu-screen-recorder". If you use it for system packages it will cause problems, because the Manjaro repos are delayed on purpose. One would encounter the same problem when using Debian stable and installing system stuff from a PPA.