Manjaro OS
Manjaro OS
So I've been iso live testing Manjaro KDE Plasma lately and it looks very polished.
On the other hand, there is a negative vibe towards it.
Why the hate?
103 comments
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In short, the maintainers have made questionable decisions over the years, and the Arch Linux packages are held back by two weeks on Manjaro for... basically no reason.
If you want an out-of-the-box solution to Arch Linux, just use EndeavourOS.
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This. Manjaro isn’t trash, but there are better options. This coming from a guy who used manjaro and loved it for years.
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So. I’m a happy Manjaro user. I don’t install a lot of things and have had AUR updates break stuff likely due to the 2 weeks delay Manjaro adds to their packages.
I’m still using it on multiple devices and I’m really happy. I considered moving to endeavour but I wasn’t sure how it would handle hardware updates. I mean, my understanding is that Manjaro is more “noob” friendly and I don’t consider myself an expert. I used the Manjaro hardware helper to fix my video drive several times and I like the simplicity of the command. Does endeavour require a more advanced user? Does it have the “easy to use” troubleshooting things that Manjaro has?
Ah. What about the Kernel uploader? I think the Manjaro one is unique to Manjaro right? Is there another one for regular arch/endeavour?
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Endeavour has plenty of "beginner" tools, including a kernel manager (literally called A Kernel Manager) and a friendly GUI Welcome app that helps you update your system and your mirrors.
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I used Manjaro for about 3 years
Its great but packages tend to break over time with it being a "stable" arch build
Over that 3 year period updates managed to break my install at least 30 times
Switched to Endeavour over a year ago and haven't had an update break my install yet
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EndeavourOS is such a good replacement for manjaro
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Wow. 30 times in 3 years? I wonder if that's specific packages or hardware you had. I had 5 computers (2 desktops, 3 laptops) running Manjaro for so many years, and still haven't had a single system break. Including using a lot of AUR packages.
Though last year, I've moved all of my computers to Arch, Debian, and Proxmox. Arch mainly because I wanted to fully configure my systems more.
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I used to be a huge Manjaro fan. There were many ways it let me down, some of which were just bad governance.
The biggest problem though is the AUR. Manjaro uses packages that are older than Arch. The AUR assumes the Arch packages. This, if your use the AUR with Manjaro, your system will break.
It is not a question of if Manjaro will break but when. Every ex-Manjaro user has the same story.
For me, EndeavourOS is everything that Manjaro should be.
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I am not the most technically astute person, using Manjaro and the AUR for like five years and never had my system break. Yes, some package problems here and there, but where do you not have them ever? And so far nothing an internet search couldn't fix. I found it very stable both in the XFCE and the KDE spin.
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The AUR doesn't assume arch packages, if the package your aur script wants isn't in your repo then the package simply fails to update/install.
Edit: This is true even for Arch linux, as the Aur package might be out of date.
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The AUR doesn't assume arch packages, if the package your aur script wants isn't in your repo then the package simply fails to update/install.
Edit: This is true even for Arch linux, as the Aur package might be out of date.
The problem is not the package. It is the packages Version. If you have for example an application that depends on .net 7.0 and arch updates it to the latest 8.0 then the AUR usually gets updated soon as well. Now the AUR pqckage depends on the newer 8.0 Version while manjaro still has the 7.0 version. The programm now does no longer start on manjaro.
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There are many cases where Manjaro causes problems. For example, a package mag already be in Arch but not yet in Manjaro. Or perhaps the Manjaro package is not a high enough version number. If another Arch package requires this first package, in Arch it would grab the Arch package. The Arch package will be maintained over time. In Manajaro, the package is not there and so the AUR grabs it from the AUR as well. Perhaps it is even the Git version with an unclear version number. Over time, the AUR dependency breaks or becomes unmaintained. Even once Manjaro has the package, it may not migrate it because of the version numbers. Now things are broken. This exact thing happened to me on Manjaro where my GIMP ended up using GEGL from the AUR. My system was broken for months.
An even worse problem can happen when there are alternate dependencies. Sometimes in the AUR you will have multiple packages that fulfill a dependency. In Arch, you can see if one is from the actual repos and one is itself from the AUR. Again, if you choose the one in the repos, it will work and stay supports. In Manjaro, neither may be coming from the actual repos in which case it is easy to choose the wrong one. This sets you up to have package conflicts. In Manjaro, I would never know that the other option had now been added to the repos. More than once, I had the dependency that I had chosen break when the other would still have been fine.
Ok, this is getting long and that was just a couple of scenarios.
Suffice it to say, when I used Manjaro, I got the impression that the AUR broke all the time and that using the AUR broke my install from time to time. Now that I use Arch, I do not have those issues and I realize that it was Manjaro all along.
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if your use the AUR with Manjaro, your system will break
Oh, bullshit.
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Yeah. Notice how he doesn't mention how Manjaro holding back packages can actually prevent breakage that Arch users have to deal with.
The manjaro hate-boner is just tribalism and elitism. Every one of these threads reinforces that.
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if your use the AUR with Manjaro, your system will break.
If your system breaks because of AUR it means you're using AUR wrong... you're not supposed to use AUR packages for critical system functions. It will break on Arch too if you do that.
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This, if your use the AUR with Manjaro, your system will break.
Been using Manjaro with the AUR for 3 years, never had the breakage you described.
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I spent 3 days trying to get manjaro to work on my old macbook air 3, and still ran into a borked display sometimes after opening from sleep
I installed endeavour os (online failed, offline worked), and so far I haven't had a single major issue with it
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There's not really any benefit of running Manjaro over Arch, it will only introduce problems over time. If you want a "pre-configured" Arch with a nice installer, go for EndeavourOS, it's great!
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I just wanna point out, people were using this exact same rhetoric when Antergos was a thing.
Antergos is no longer a thing. Just saying. Manjaro still is though! I believe it's older than endeavor OS.
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Even if Endeavour stopped development tomorrow, I could still use and update my system normally because it’s using the regular Arch repos.
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You mean manjarNO?
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Yup, exactly that!
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Most of the hate is because of the maintainers not maintaining their security certificates. Another similar distro is EndeavourOS, which I personally prefer. But either way, find what works for you.
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Just out of curiosity I've looked for that a couple of months ago and I found that it's relatively easy to transform a Manjaro installation to Arch and Endeavor. IIRC it was just adding new repo keys and changing the repos. People attempting that would have to look the guide up for details.
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Manjaro for some reason can't stop breaking crap, and when they do break crap, they aren't exactly elegant about it
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Been using it exclusively for 3 years, never had breakage.
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I wish I was that lucky, the final straw for me was the grub-customizer shenanigans, manjaro pushed an update that broke grub customizer boot entries, then when users were trying to figure it out, they removed grub customizer, and then they even went so far as to make grub conflict with grub-customizer which was really asinine. IIRC they even wound up locking the forum thread on it
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Just give it a go. I used it for years, and had relatively little issues tbh. Most of them I think are hardware related as I'll have similar issues in other distros and even windows.
The devs have done some goofs yes. Things like letting certs expire, and as mentioned already, potential issues with aur. But, I remember having aur issues even with vanilla arch in the past.
Using fedora currently though, and I don't think I'll switch anytime soon.
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Fedora is great, very leading edge but stable AF
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My personal negative vibe toward Manjaro comes from my own experience with updates breaking things when I was running it
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I'll keep it short and sweet.
I've been using Manjaro for about 6 years now.
When I had an Nvidia GPU, it would break after quite a few updates and need a rollback.
Then I moved to an AMD card, and I haven't had any issues at all.
Like...at all.
The End.
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It's not all "purists" and "tribalism", Manjaro actually has issues. Besides the well known certificate issues and older packages, I have the following anecdote which made me really dislike it.
A friend has Manjaro and one day his nvidia drivers stopped working after an update. I helped troubleshoot over the phone, while looking over the wiki. For nvidia drivers they have their own wrapper around pacman.
Turns out there's a different nvidia driver for each kernel version. Already a stupid design. So unlike arch where there's 1 kernel package (the latest the distro offers) and 1 matching nvidia driver, Manjaro has dozens...
The wiki never mentions how to install or update the drivers manually with pacman or anything like that. It pushes their own tool, a stupid wrapper around pacman, which is supposed to manage this for you.
In my friend's case, the tool failed. It was trying to run pacman but there was a conflict issue. But the tool didn't show the pacman output, so we couldn't figure out what the tool is trying to do, and why it doesn't work. We tried removing the tool and re-installing, and all kinds of messing around with it. It failed to install the drivers, it failed to remove the drivers, it kept failing whatever we tried.
Eventually we figured out the naming convention they used for the packages (again not mentioned in the wiki), and manage to install the correct kernel - driver pair manually, using pacman.
Tl;dr: poor design, bad documentation, and they push their own crappy tools which hinder instead of helping
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there’s a different nvidia driver for each kernel version. Already a stupid design
That's not a stupid design at all. A nvidia kernel module artifact is only compatible with exactly one kernel ABI. Thus you need one binary nvidia package for each kernel you ship.
Arch also has one package for every kernel ABI they ship:
nvidiaandnvidia-lts.
Though it should be noted that their design assumes that these two ABIs are the only possible ABIs which isn't strictly the case as the zen, hardened or RT variants may sometimes lag behind their regular counterpart. That's a stupid design if anything as it increases the friction of kernel ABI upgrades as a kernel package maintainer.We at NixOS also ship the nvidia module for each of our ~50 kernel variants; all major versions of the Nvidia module compatible with that kernel in fact.
The only possible way to access these nvidia kernel modules is via a certain kernel'slinuxPackagesattribute set that contains all packages that rely on a kernel ABI such as kernel modules or packages likeperf. That's good design if you ask me but I'm obviously biased ;) -
Turns out there’s a different nvidia driver for each kernel version
That is literally every version of Linux out there. IDK what you think was different about Manjaro in that respect. Nvidia hates linux and it's a tough thing to keep it running, especially on a rolling release. Use the DKMS driver if you're going to update kernels a lot. At least manjaro seperates the kernel installs from the general updates to minimize this disruption.
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I know that these packages are "linked", and for every kernel update you need a new nvidia driver, I don't understand though why they keep so many kernel versions in the repo (and their respective nvidia drivers ofc). Just makes things confusing, I assume people generally want the latest kernel the distro has to offer, or if they want something else it's a different kernel "flavor" like lts, zen, rt, etc.
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It’s not all “purists” and “tribalism”
I disagree.
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I have manjaro running on six machines. No problems that were not Just part of learning. Two of those computers were for testing different distros.... All ended up with Manjaro.
Hate is for people that don't create, or improve their own world.
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While on one hand Manjaro is very polished. Some things they do is questionable. Like the time they suggested to change your date and time because they let their repo keys expire. Or accidentally DDOS the AUR. Just to name some. The Manjaro team has a rather bad track record of these things.
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That stuff is negligible compared to Mint getting hacked and hosting a malicious ISO.
But for some reason you never hear people mention that about Mint 🤷
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I am currently using Manjaro as my main Laptop OS.
Most of the hate is philosophical based in small often overlookable facts. And how Manjaro uses/is compatible with the AUR. There's a whole github dedicated to the communities complaints here: https://github.com/arindas/manjarno
While I can see why many don't like manjaro, I personally see these complaints as a way to evaluate the company to see if they improve.
My experience with Manjaro is about 1-2 years now. And the OS is very stable, honestly more stable than my brief time with Fedora.
But I did break a lot during that time including my DE. However as long as you are careful on where you install from, the distro will be stable.
Install order
- Official Repo - this is delayed by a few weeks to "validate stability", one of the sticking points for the community
- Flatpak
- AUR - due to the delayed official packages some AUR packages won't update immediately, or will cause conflict when they are.
AUR support is honestly the only valid issue with Manjaro. Due to the delay AUR packages will break as older dependencies aren't being updated causing a large string of removals which can cause stability issued in Manjaro.
My recommendation is to avoid the AUR unless the package isn't found elsewhere. Which is a problem if you installed Arch for AUR. Thus EndeavorOS is preferred.
But for my usage I prefer the graphical interfaces for all setting. With the exception of GRUB, there is a GUI for everything and you won't need to touch a terminal.
With that said, you may want to look into OpenSUSE or Fedora/CentOS, and they are similar in terms of GUI settings. And are a little safer since OS level packages are behind another package manager.
But at the cost of less software. For me I'm stuck with Manjaro for now, and as soon as Slimbook battery is officially on Fedora trying that out again.
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I have something like 70 AUR packages on Manjaro and doing fine. Yes, they break every once in a while. They break on Arch too.
The thing is, you have to update AUR packages. They're compiled against a certain system state and they will break eventually as the system updates. This will happen with source packages on any distro. It has nothing to do with Manjaro.
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Agreed.
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Are you saying that as an Arch user or a Manjaro user? Have you ever used a different Arch distro? I am just wondering how many of the “other Arch distros are just as broken” people have actually used both. I have used several. In my experience, Manjaro stands alone in terms of the number of problems I have had. I guess I am just unlucky.
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I've had it break many times during update. Don't get me wrong, I liked it at first, but if you want a system that works after update, you're probably better checking elsewhere. Linux Mint, and Kubuntu are far better simplicity wise. Open Suse or Arch if you want rolling updates.
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I've been using Manjaro for about 7 years at this point. I've had issues maybe 5 times, and nothing I couldn't fix.
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I have almost a dozen installs of it in the wild for a few years now, with friends and relatives that aren't very computer literate. It has been virtually maintenance free. This is on wildly disparate hardware as well, and it's always installed nicely and with little messing around after to get things working.
People like to hate on it; it's been by far the most reliable distro I've used, far better than "just works^TM " distros like Fedora and Ubuntu. I'd ignore the naysayers and use if it works for you.
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Manjaro is the best.
The longer you spend in these internet communities, the more you'll realize there's a substantial amount of losers who can't form their own opinions. They'll just repeat whatever is popular in order to fit in.
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Besides the points made - using their own repos. It kind of defeats an important point of using Arch, if you don't use the official repos as your main source of packages imo.
It's a rolling release. You have to let it roll. Arch already has testing repos, there is zero need to test outside of them.
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there is zero need to test outside of them.
Then how do you explain Arch users have to deal with breakages Manjaro users do not because the Manjaro team doesn't push updates as quickly?
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Because they don't push updates as quickly, which reduces the chances of something slipping through, be it their merit or not. This comes at the expense that it sometimes breaks dependencies and still has close to zero real benefits:
- You are better off simply using snapshots. Then you don't depend on the testing of either party.
- Even if the Manjaro devs do to find bugs, they could have found them in Arch Testing as well, which benefits everyone.
I stand by my point that the update strategy is not a feature.
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There will always be some haters. Haters are emotionally motivated to engage while most other ppl dgaf. So it's normal you'll see a bit more of them.
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I haven't seen this mentioned yet, and there's a good number of responses so maybe I'm up in the night, but it seems to me Manjaro's philosophy is somewhat counterintuitive to Arch's. Arch pointedly obfuscates system internals as little as is reasonable to "keep it simple" from a system perspective. Manjaro simplifies things for the user but creates additional obfuscation. I can see some people who value Arch's approach being less than amenable to that.
But that's not a reason to not use it. If Manjaro's approach appeals to you, use it.
BTW, I don't use Arch (at the moment)
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The real question is, why are you considering Manjaro in the first place? What does it do that a different distro, without all the hate (which I personally think are 100% justified), doesn't do? Why "risk" it?
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I'm an openSuse user for quite some time without any issues tbh. Just wanted to enter the Arch world and see if there is any significant difference.
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Then literally just use Arch. I don't understand why people want Arch but then install something different. If you don't want to go through the install process then it's honestly just not for you, but if you really want to try anyway give EndeavourOS a shot.
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I would recommend reading through the first parts of the arch install tutorial, particularly the network connection through the terminal. If you're comfortable with that, the archinstall utility makes the rest of the process effortless. I've had Manjaro bork itself but not just plain arch.
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Why “risk” it?
People were saying this back when it was Antergos vs. Manjaro. You know what? I used Antergos and it shut the fuck down. Manjaro is still going strong. I'm still using Manjaro.
I think the bigger risk would be to use endeavor os, even if more people like to shill it (like you predictably did.)
But experience speaks for itself. Who cares what a bunch of losers on the internet say if your experience is different?
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I ran Manjaro happily for a while because I was scared of the Arch installation process. A couple of years ago, though, an update broke my system. By then, the archinstall script had come along so I tried installing Arch with that and I haven't looked back.
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Install the plasma meta package though, otherwise lots of stuff is missing
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I haven't personally used Manjaro but I've been daily driving EndeavourOS with KDE for a few months and it's been rock solid.
Like Manjaro it's also Arch based but still uses the vanilla Arch repos, Basically it's just Arch for lazy people (like me).
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It works for me, I have KDE version. I have AUR apps, SNAP (VSC works better in snap than flatpak), official repo apps. I have not had any errors in the 6 months I have been using it.
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I've had nothing but a great stable experience with it. I tried the other distros like endeavor and Garuda but they both looked ugly and had some issue after install. I think people hate manjaro because it's bloated but I appreciated that everything I needed was already setup, configured and good to go.
I didn't install any aur packages because those are unsupported and I don't know enough to support them myself.
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Running Manjaro here. I'm been using Linux exclusively for years, and while I'm not a power user I like to think I'm conversant with it. I've had the odd problem here or there, but honestly not any more than I would expect with any other distro. I picked it because I wanted a rolling release distro that used KDE, and SuSE Tumbleweed didn't want to install that day!
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Used Manjaro in the past, worst distros i've used. Wifi card detections, Screen display and kernel issues,. Re-installed it many times. Never had thoses problems with Arch, Debian, & Ubuntu
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Basically, the Manjaro team has no idea what they're doing.
The ManjarNO sheep can fuck off to Reddit for all I care.
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Most of the hate posts in this thread, seem to have the same issue: Nvidia.
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Endavour OS
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No hate from me,but rather a simple question? Why use preconfigured distros instead of the original,always best, with
archinstallscript? You can even install pamac or whatever package installer tool manjaro uses.
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Real reason for the hate: The Linux community is overly focused on tribalism and has a console-wars mindset where what I'm using is obviously the best and everything else must be flawed and terrible. Manjaro is probably fine for most use cases.
...although I'd still suggest just using base Arch instead. :)
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This is the truth. I'm glad more people are starting to realize it.
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Linux is tribal for sure. But the Manjaro issues are real ( as a past user ).
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None of the complaints people have about Manjaro affect me.
Been using Manjaro exclusively for 3 years.
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I have been daily driving since 2018 on Manjaro + KDE. In the beginning, considering it is a rolling distro I just update the system every other week and it would break fairly often. But in reality most users really don't need to do sudo pacman -syyu unless they need certain and specific software update. That's the great thing about Linux, it is not forcing you to update like Windows update. You do update when you specifically need it and know what you want. There's barely any serious virus or security exploit for average Linux users. There are many top world supercomputers running on outdated kernels.
If you are not chasing bleeding edge status, and update your Manjaro less regularly, say on par with Linux Mint update schedules of every 6 months or so, then it'll break less often unless you are really really unlucky.
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Zorin OS
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There was a lot of misinformation about manjaro regarding the "Aur DDOS" and their finances that people still repeat to this day.
The person maintaining the manjarno repo which was a very popular site where all the critism of manjaro was recently corrected all those mistakes and then later took the website down.
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Mostly misdirected anger from two categories — Arch purists who balk at the notion of someone modding their beloved distro, and newbs who blame Manjaro for issues they create themselves and they would have on any Arch-based distro.
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Mostly misdirected anger from two categories — Arch purists who balk at the notion of someone modding their beloved distro, and newbs who blame Manjaro for issues they create themselves and they would have on any Arch-based distro.
Nope not at all. The built in and by Manjaro maintained packagemanager pamac bricks systems. Has not bricked mine since i use pacman instead.
The packages are just the arch packages delayed by a few days which makes it incompatible with the (by default enabled an encouraged to use) AUR.
Here is a total list of what is wrong with it: https://github.com/arindas/manjarno
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