this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023
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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!

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[–] zlatiah@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago

Opinion you said?... https://manjarno.snorlax.sh/

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

[–] Anomalocarididae@pawb.social 4 points 1 year ago

I heard that the maintainers let some important web certificates expire, which is a big no-no.

[–] SchizoRamblings@vlemmy.net 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] GrumpyRobot@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] rizoid@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] IUsedTo@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Manjaro is what got me into Arch

Is Manjaro even considered an Arch? I though it's Arch based. Maybe I'm wrong

[–] INeedMana@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago

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"

[–] Scraft161@iusearchlinux.fyi 2 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] SweetAIBelle@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] exohuman@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] poVoq 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] feyo@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

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.

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.

[–] blacpythoz@hamro.world 1 points 1 year ago

I don't know. I don't feel right if not arch like something missing

[–] pinkolik@random-hero.com 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] moritz@lemmy.deltaa.xyz 1 points 1 year ago

This site gives some reasons: https://manjarno.snorlax.sh/

[–] plexnose@u.fail 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Too many instances of poor management, and the 2 week package delay issue.

Doesn’t seem to be a good reason to use it when Endeavour exists.

[–] v7x@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Exactly. I have not looked back since changing to EndeavourOs!

[–] DigDoug@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] Zamundaaa@discuss.tchncs.de 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Simply freezing them for two weeks

That's not what they're doing at all. That dumb myth needs to die.

[–] original_reader@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Can you expand on this? A source would be great here to properly debunk this.

[–] Zamundaaa@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Sure. When it comes to updates, Manjaro is pretty much doing what every single other distro is doing. Updates that are buggy don't get pushed to the stable branch until they're fixed up, and security updates tend to get pushed through faster than feature updates. The time period that updates get held up by is not a fixed duration, it depends on the specific package and update and can be anywhere between a few days and a few weeks.

As a concrete example, with some major Plasma updates Manjaro has waited for three or even four point releases (4 / 8 weeks) before considering it stable enough vs the newest point release of the previous major release, and following point releases after that get pushed to stable much faster.

As another point, even Arch has a very similar process... Their policy on pushing updates is far more geared towards pushing updates quickly than towards not breaking things, but otherwise it's pretty much the same.

Idk about a source on this stuff though. There's stuff like https://wiki.manjaro.org/index.php/Switching_Branches but I don't know anything better.

Manjaro packages start their lives in the unstable branch. Once they are a deemed stable, they are moved to the testing branch, where more tests will be realized to ensure the package is ready to be submitted to the stable branch

[–] Ravan@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

I heard some security issues with it, can't confirm.

[–] obsoulete@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

[–] Quazatron@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I've been using it for nearly 3 years and encountered minimal issues. I'm using it on a Lenovo E14 all AMD laptop, mostly for gaming and web browsing.

[–] Eldritch@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

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.