What is your unbiased opinion on Manjaro?
I am a Linux noobie and have only used Mint for around six months now. While I have definitely learned a lot, I don't have the time to always be doing crazy power user stuff and just want something that works out of the box. While I love Mint, I want to try out other decently easy to use distros as well, specifically not based on Ubuntu, so no Pop OS. Is Manjaro a possibly good distro for me to check out?
if you want an Arch based distro, Endeavour OS is more popular – Manjaro has had a few issues over the years
Just switched to EndeavourOS about a week ago from Manjaro and been liking it so far.
Biggest reason for the change was my manjaro install was getting cluttered, and moving over to a new distro ( taking all my previous knowledgement with it) has been a blessing.
Beforehand, my Manjaro install was EFI, whereas my Windows 11 drive ( yes I know) was UEFI so switching on boot was an issue. Now both are on UEFI and show up within Grub.
Endeavor OS has bluetooth turned off by default. Thought there was an issue but nope.
So from no issues with updating, even with AUR turned on.
I just like starting fresh and setting things up with all my previous knowledge.
thanks to the archinstall tool it's very easy to install arch the way you want to
it's much lighter than Manjaro and has been very stable for me
I have used it in the past for a few years. I don't think you should. Why?
If you just want something not-Ubuntu and easy to use, I tend to favor Fedora personally.
I agree completely.
As a sidenote: If somebody wants something easy-to-use that is arch-based I'd suggest EndevaourOS.
What even is an unbiased opinion? That doesn't even begin to make sense.
That being said, my very biased opinion is that it's a great way to install Arch without learning how Arch works so that when it inevitably breaks you don't even know how to ask the right questions.
"Unbiased opinion" is an oxymoron.
As an Arch user this is how I feel about Manjaro as well. Installing Arch not only allows you to customize every aspect from the shell to the DE and more but also teaches you how to maintain and fix your OS when it breaks.
The best Arch-based distro is Arch.
Personally, I think the idea that you can't ask the right questions because you haven't installed Arch manually is a silly notion that's borderline gatekeeping. It's why Arch users have the reputation that they do and why Arch itself has a reputation for being difficult even though it really isn't.
Over the years, I've moved from Manjaro to Antergos to Endeavor, and then finally the official archinstall tool. I probably will never be arsed to install Arch by hand, but it doesn't mean that when something breaks I don't know how to consult the Arch Wiki and fix it myself.
Do users of other distros not know how to ask the right questions? Are Arch users the only ones who know their system inside and out? I don't think so. Every person has their own threshold for how much investment they want to make into learning about their system, no matter the distro.
The reason Arch users all end up like this is that we've all tried to help someone, been run around for hours, and then finally figured out that the problem is caused by some stupid thing that Manjaro did despite the person insisting the whole time that they're using Arch and there's literally nothing we could do to help, only to be called an elitist gatekeeper for trying to point it out because "It's the same thing." Fuck that, and fuck you for calling me a gatekeeper.
If you want to use Arch use Arch. You are welcome to use it. It's not actually hard. If you can read a wiki, you can install Arch. It's not a fucking herculean task that only super-geniuses can manage. I get it. Some people's brains don't mesh with the wiki style of information presentation, and that's okay. That doesn't make you inferior or unintelligent, but if you think the Arch wiki is good for other things then you can just install it in an afternoon. I promise. And you'll learn more in that afternoon than you learn in a year of using Manjaro. Seriously. I'm not kidding.
If that's not what you want, there are almost certainly other distros that are way, waaaaaaay better for you than any Arch-based distro is. I can't actually stop anyone from using Manjaro, or Endeavor, or whatever else they want to use, and I wouldn't want to be able to. I'm not in charge of your life. If you want to do something stupid you should be able to make that choice. I just want to point out how stupid it is. Is that so wrong?
I disagree. Not everyone wants to spend the time to completely customize their system. Distros like Manjaro and Endeavor give people a decent "just works" install while still giving them experience with the Arch ecosystem. The forums are usually a good resource, and everything on the arch wiki still applies. It might just be because I had previous linux experience, but I've learned a lot running Manjaro.
The average person is not going to jump straight into vanilla Arch as their first distro, but after a couple years with Manjaro, they might try it.
If you don't want to spend the time to completely customize your system just don't use an Arch based system. Seriously. Arch has some neat things about it, but it's not the magical be all and end all of distros. If you don't want to use what it's good at use Mint, or Debian, or PopOS, or Ubuntu, or Fedora, or if you want something bleeding edge use OpenSuse Tumbleweed. You don't have to use shitty imitation Arch if you don't want to use Arch. You also don't need experience with Manjaro to use Arch. I jumped straight into Arch after using Mint for years and it was fine. I still use Mint on my laptop and as a backup on my old drive I moved to my new computer just in case I do something stupid in Arch. Mint is great. I just like playing around with completely customizing my system. Why would you want something Arch based if you don't care about the main thing it's actually good at?
Idiot Devs that forgot to renew their certificates twice in a single year. A pm that can break your packages. A treasurer hat gotbfires cause he didnt allow the CEO to buy a 2k gaming laptop. They fiddled with arch so much there is a chance when something goes wrong, its likely manjaros fault.
They are not to be trusted frankly.
Use endeavouros, it makes arch actually usable Instead of a KISS nightmare and doesn't have any of the manjaro baggage.
Don't forget that on 3 separate occasions they literally DDOSed the AUR
I never recommend Manjaro, even for experienced users. Multiple times, they've let their ssl certificats expire, and renewing those has been easy to automate for a number of years at this point. There have been a number of cases where they ship work-in-progress versions of software as part of their default install, and there was an open letter posted calling this out: https://dont-ship.it
So in my opinion, Manjaro leaves much to be desired from a project governance standpoint.
Now, using an Arch-based distro that does the install process for you doesn't absolve you from learning what it takes to maintain an Arch install; at some point, something will crop-up that requires manual intervention to get back up & running again after an update.
If that is what you're looking for, I suggest EndeavourOS.
if you want to use Arch, just use Arch
I love arch as much as the next guy but it can be a bit of a bugger to install. It's reasonable to want a little more simplicity with all of the benefits of arch.
Look up Calam Arch Installer. It's an installer ISO for Arch (using official Arch repos) that uses the Calamares installer which is the same installer Manjaro uses. It makes Arch easy to install, I've used it for all my Arch installs.
I used to love Manjaro. It looks gorgeous ( to my eye ). Sadly, I now see it as a bit of a low-quality mess with governance issues. Manjaro broke my system more than once. Although I did not believe it when I used Manjaro, getting off of it has shown me that I regularly had AUR compatibility problems as well.
These days, I would recommend EndevourOS over Manjaro. It is just as easy in practice, I have found it to be far more stable. Once installed, EndevourOS is 99.8% the same as a well configured vanilla Arch. It uses the Arch package repositories natively.
Even more than Manjaro, I used to love Pamac and graphical package management. Now I think Pamac is garbage. It has caused so many problems for me. I mostly use yay to manage packages now. A really great middle ground between GUI package management and yay or pacman is pacseek. You have to use yay to install it but, for the times I may have missed Pamac, it has been awesome.
I used manjaro for a long while before I distro hopped and I think it’s a fine distro. Never had any problems with it. People keep pointing to the couple of times when it had some certificate issues. I don’t think it’s very relevant, and I only had positive things to say while I was using it.
I think Manjaro is a bit of a mixed bag. A good distro in it self but their are issues. Arch is great and a big part of it is due to the AUR. When using the AUR you can easily get dependentie conflics if you use it on Manjaro.
Also some sloppy things from the devs. From adding broken patches (some driver thing). To exidentely ddosing the AUR.
I used to run Manjaro, and I can't recommend it for a new user. While the UX is user friendly, the distro itself is not. Ive very often had upgrade and update issues that i have wasted days fixing.
I'd instead recommend fedora workstation as a non-ubuntu option
Second Fedora workstation. Spent almost an entire year distro hopping to find a distro that worked out the box with my laptops touch screen. Fedora has been the one - super polished too!
Wouldn't let it touch my system. Try Endeavor if you want to hop to an arch based distro.
May I ask why?
EndeavorOS was my first desktop distro and it's a great beginner distro in my opinion. Most stuff is sanely pre-configured and dealing with stuff like Nvidia drivers and Steam is one click away.
I'm not a fan for a few reasons, but they're all on my end.
I will say, though, that if you "don't have time to always be doing crazy power user stuff," an Arch based distro might not be what you're looking for. This is especially true of an Arch based distro that strays pretty far from the core distribution.
My suggestion would be to try Fedora or OpenSuse Tumbleweed instead. I'm a big Fedora fan, and it's honestly great - much better than Ubuntu IMHO. It's also easy to maintain and less prone to user-induced breakage than Arch distros.
If you're looking for something even more different, but still not prone to breakage, then you might try looking into an immutable distro. Silverblue, OpenSuse Aeon, blendOS, or VanillaOS are all nice places to start looking.
I've used Arch, Manjaro, and Endeavour. For ease of use it's between Manjaro and Endeavour and I'd pick Endeavour. Arch is great too. When you're ready to go deeper, give it a shot.
What is your biased opinion on having unbiased opinions?
You can't be unbiased.
really? Noooo!!!
I run Manjaro as my gaming rig and have had no real issues.
Me too. 🙌
It sucks.
I've never used Manjaro, but I've used Arch (I don't currently use it) enough to know where it went wrong. Basically, they're trying to make a snapshot based distro out of a distro that's not snapshot based, and they run into issues because of it. On Arch, if you have an issue, you revert and wait a couple days. On Manjaro, if you have an issue, you revert and then wait, a week? Two? Is there any reasonable assumption that the next snapshot is good? I don't think they have the manpower to ensure snapshots are high quality, so they're merely whatever existed at the time, perhaps with obvious issues fixed.
I currently use OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, which is snapshot based by design, while also being a rolling release. The way OpenSUSE works is by having all snapshots go through openQA, which means all snapshots (near daily) go through an automated test suite. So if something breaks, they'll write a test and the next snapshot won't have that issue.
So my opinion is to go with something release based (e.g. Mint) or bleeding edge (e.g. Arch), but don't try to go somewhere in the middle unless you have a larger team. So either trust your user or your dev team, there shouldn't be a middle ground.
I’ve never used Manjaro, but I’ve used Arch (I don’t currently use it) enough to know where it went wrong. Basically, they’re trying to make a snapshot based distro out of a distro that’s not snapshot based, and they run into issues because of it. On Arch, if you have an issue, you revert and wait a couple days. On Manjaro, if you have an issue, you revert and then wait, a week? Two? Is there any reasonable assumption that the next snapshot is good? I don’t think they have the manpower to ensure snapshots are high quality, so they’re merely whatever existed at the time, perhaps with obvious issues fixed.
I've used Manjaro for ~2 years, then switched to Arch. Had fewer problems when updating Arch than Manjaro and installing stuff from AUR is working much better.
If you don't want to go through the Arch installation process (though it's quite easy now with archinstall), you may want to take a look at EndeavourOS. I haven't personally used it, but it has an easy installation like Manjaro and does not hold packages back
I used Arch for ~5 years on three different systems, so I'm pretty familiar with the installation process. My reason for leaving was two-fold:
I needed to switch from FreeBSD to Linux on my server because I wanted to run docker containers, so I decided to try something different. OpenSUSE was the only realistic option that offered a stable server distro and a solid rolling desktop distro, so I switched my server to Leap and a year or so later switched my desktop to Tumbleweed.
Tumbleweed solves the first issue as well by running BTRFS by default on root with snapper configured. I've done a few rollbacks in the 3-4 years I've used it, and it's way better than trying to fix an Arch system with pacman. I could get the same effect with Arch, but most users aren't going to consider BTRFS or ZFS on root with Arch (I had BTRFS on /home on Arch, but that didn't help much).
I think Arch is a fine distro and I certainly recommend using it to those it makes sense for. I also think EndeavorOS is a fine way to get into it, though I do recommend installing it once using the standard test based installer to mostly get familiar with the tools (I've had to chroot to fix Arch). However, it's not my first recommendation, and I instead recommend Mint to anyone asking. I love Tumbleweed, but I'm not going to recommend any rolling release distro to someone unfamiliar with Linux. Release based distros break very rarely, and if they do, it's usually at release upgrade where it's expected, so mitigation isn't as important.
Anyway, I think I'll stop rambling now. In short, don't use Manjaro, use either Arch or EndeavorOS if you want rolling, or a release based distro if you don't.
This makes so much sense... I used Manjaro like 2 or 3 years ago and really loved it... Until it just died one day a couple months in. I spent a good amount of time troubleshooting and when I couldn't fix it I gave up on it.
Figured since Manjaro came so highly recommended, Linux and I just weren't enough on the same level yet and to give it some more time... But from reading all the comments in this thread, it sounds like I had the typical Manjaro experience.
Man, I kinda wish it wasn't as commonly recommended. Hell even I've recommended it as I had a really good experience with it before it died and I assumed that was my fault; after all, so many people recommend manjaro that it's more likely I alone was the problem, not the distro...
Yeah, and that's the problem. It's kind they gave all of the elitism of typical Arch users, but without the general stability to back it up. They try to make Arch more stable but holding back certain updates, but that just creates more problems because they don't have the manpower to actually test that combination of packages.
If you want a "stable" rolling release, use Tumbleweed, they have a decent team that prioritizes testing. If you want a super customized setup, use Arch (or Void). If you want Arch, but don't want to install it manually, use EndeavorOS. But don't use Manjaro, it can break in unexpected ways because of how they manage their package repository.
But if you're new to Linux, you should probably use Mint. It works really well out of the box, there are lots of flavors, and it'll be easy to find guides and support.
It sucks. I've never used Manjaro
If you've never used it then it doesn't suck half as much as your opinion.
I used Arch for long enough (~5 years) to have seen plenty of people blame Arch for problems unique to Manjaro. I've also been following PinePhone development hoping to jump in once it stabilizes, and Manjaro is the distro with the most problems by far. Most of the problems Manjaro has, they create for themselves by trying to make Arch "more stable," whatever that's supposed to mean.
Use what you like, but I just do not feel comfortable recommending Manjaro to anyone. I'll continue to recommend Mint, Arch, OpenSUSE, and Void depending on what users are looking for.
He said it badly but his longer explanation was “I have never used it but I spent enough time ina closely linked community and heard enough horror stories to know that it sucks”. I mean, that seems fair actually.
I've had more success with Manjaro than any other distro. I've gotten lots of software working because of the great package manager, all using a GUI. I think it's really easy to use and at the same time really flexible and powerful. I've tried to install Arch twice and failed both times. I guess I'm an idiot. Manjaro is easy to install and you get all the power a flexibility of Arch's package management.
They say that the arch-installer is a great way to install Arch. In case you give it a try again. It's bundled with the Arch Iso.
I tried it when it first came out but it kept failing due to a bug. I've been meaning to try it out again
My unbiased opinion is that for what it sets out to achieve (no hastle Arch Linux setup) there are better options. EndeavourOS is worth looking at. I'll leave it to others to list the drawbacks of Manjaro's package triaging approach. I'm still having my morning coffee in bed, so I'm typing this with one hand.
If you want to divorce yourself from Ubuntu (and I think that's a good idea myself) you can always run Linux Mint Debian Edition. Since you're so new to Linux, I would stick with Linux Mint as your daily driver and take the time to really learn the command line, shell scripting, process control, and everything Unix-like. Get good with tools like awk, sed, grep, find, and learn about regex. Distro hopping won't help to really learn the ins and outs.
Also take time to learn tools like iptables/nftables, ip route, IP forwarding. There's so much you can learn without distro hopping. Once you become well versed in all things command line, then you can start searching for use case specific distro. I use Arch myself but it's not for the beginning user.
If you want something user friendly and something with good gui support, why not try out fedora or opensuse tumbleweed
How is anyone supposed to have an unbiased opinion?
What features of Manjaro would make it something you prefer? A different DE? Mint offers more than just one.
I have several family members and friends on Manjaro for the last several years. I have had virtually no need to intervene with it on their behalf, and these are users with zero linux knowledge (one of them believes they have a Mac because I pimped the UI to look like OSX).
Despite the detractors, I think it's the least hassle distro I've encountered, and I've used Linux for 25 years.
Opinions are always biased.
Is that your unbiased opinion about opinions?
I ran Manjaro for a couple of years as my daily driver before moving on to EndeavourOS. At this point I've probably spent an equal amount of time on both distros.
Their holding back of arch packages might sound like a good idea, but in reality not so much. Most of the time the same oopsies slip through with a bit of delay. Other times being out of sync with AUR causes additional issues. Arch stable is already stable, so holding back is just extra work with no gain in my book. Any additional testing effort would be better spent on Arch testing instead of doing the same work with delay.
It's like EndeavourOS but with more issues I guess. Oh and green instead of purple.
I've installed Arch, Arcos and Manjaro (from the Arch based distros). Manjaro and Arcos are faster and easier to install and setup compared to Arch. Manjaro has nice GUI to select kernel, GPU drivers and install software (and does not automatically move you to the newest kernel, as opposed to Arch or Arcos). They had fucked up (I think 3 times) with renewing their SSL certificate, and for a short while their ISOs were unverifiable (not that big of an issue if you ask me). Since they delay their packages' updates, running them in testing for a few months for extra stability, installing from AUR is bound to break.
I've installed Manjaro on 3 computers, and worked with it extensively for about 3 years. It's a decent distro that doesn't deserve all the hate it gets.
Sometimes maybe good, sometimes maybe shit
I've used it on a couple of headless machines over the years primarily as a host for docker containers. It's been mostly great but those few times it has broken was really annoying. Nothing I couldn't fix and never needed to reinstall though.
That being said I'll be reconfiguring soon and I thinking about switching away and using Debian.
Was my first distro and used it for years without isses
Loved it
It's not reliable. They try to combine stable with unstable packages and it doesn't work. It's only a matter of time before your graphics get messed up and you boot into a terminal. Avoid.
Get Linux Mint. You'll thank me
I installed Manjaro for many people and have thoroughly regretted it, using it was a battle and over time the install would for seemingly no reason break.
I no longer give people manjaro, endeavor is significantly better. Or the arch installer.
Nope. Countless stories of updates breaking everything, developer incompetency (pamac, their GUI pacman wrapper, took the AUR down twice) and a lot more.
https://youtu.be/5KNK3e9ScPo (keep in mind that the treasury thing never happened)
For a more successful attempt at a stable rolling release, try openSUSE tumbleweed. For an arch based solution, try EndeavorOS or Garuda.
Fedora does do a point release model but not nearly as bad as Ubuntu's.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/5KNK3e9ScPo
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
TBH, if you don't have bleeding edge hardware just stay with OPENSUSE Leap, Debian Stable, Linux Mint or LMDE. If you are feeling adventurous, even Slackware will cover your back most of the time and gives you more bragging rights than Arch. Even if you have bleeding edge hardware, you are better off with OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, Fedora and Arch.
Manjaro is just not that stable. It once was the only way to install an Arch-ish system without having to go through the hassle of the official Arch installation guide, but currently there are several options to avoid this guide and still have a vanilla Arch system. That's how I used Manjaro for a brief period. The tools I remember they provide, or even better alternatives, are in the Arch User Repo (AUR) anyway, available for all Arch-like distro users. Maybe the only exception to this is the wide catalog of kernels that Manjaro provides, but an equally extensive catalog is available for Arch users through official and third-party repos and the AUR.
Manjaro is not quite exciting but also not quite stable. I think it's a distro most people get by accident.
Debian unstable best for gaming
Manjaro is a great way for a new linux user to inevitably break their install and have no idea how they did it, then never figure out how to fix it, while breaking it more while trying.
I’ve never installed it, but I know a few people who used it as their first distro, and none of them recommend it, or other arch based distros, and especially not to new users. For the above reason.
Regular arch is better, but I’d only recommend it if you are interested in becoming a power user.
I have been using fedora for a while now, and it has been surprisingly stable and functional out of the box. I’ve only broken my install once in the past two years, and that’s been because I do a lot of power user things. As for new linux users, I’ve recommended it to a few friends who were starting out, and they’ve had great success with it.
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is another distro that might be good if you want something that just works while being rolling release. I’ve tried it out alongside OpenSUSE Leap and Fedora, but ended up preferring Fedora.
Debian was my first distro, and I’ve enjoyed using it. I used this extensively before I was much of a power user with great success, and I’ve heard many people say great things about debian 12.
I've distro-hopped quite a bit. I used Manjaro for about 4-5 months. I really liked it actually. I did end up having some problems after an update, and even with some community help, I wasn't able to fix it. After that, I decided to try Arch and ended up loving and using it for the past 5 or so years.
If you're new to Linux and insist on using an Arch based distro, Manjaro is probably a good choice for you, but if you have used Linux for a while and are comfortable with system configuration, I really couldn't recommend Arch enough.
Both communities are very well established and responsive, but Arch is on its own level. The Arch wiki is really an amazing thing, and aside from some gatekeepers, the majority of the Arch community is happy to help.
I know you said that you don't want to be doing "crazy power user stuff" all the time, but really once you get everything set up the way you like it (it took me maybe 2-3 hours after installation), you can basically leave configuration and use it just like Manjaro and have -- in my experience -- a more stable system.
Up to you, but you seem like you might be comfortable in Linux already, so I'd recommend just going for Arch.
Does Arch have drive encryption integrated? Or do you have to use LUKS like manjaro and decrypt the drive before booting into it?
The whole thing with holding back package updates for a some weeks doesn't make a ton of sense to me, especially given that to my understanding security updates are often held back as well. The main advantage over Arch is that it has a graphical installer, but IMO Arch really isn't that hard to install now with archinstall being a thing.
In another vein, they've let their website certificate expire on multiple occasions, and have shipped pamac versions that have ended up DDoSing the AUR on multiple occasions as well. All this hints at some fairly serious mismanagement and doesn't exactly lend itself to the implicit trust required of distro maintainers.
I did use Manjaro for a decent stretch before eventually switching to Arch, and functionally I didn't notice any difference after switching apart from the AUR manager I used and packages making their way to my system sooner. This is a big part of why I say I don't really see the point.
Not really an opinion but I guess an experience - Manjaro was my first ever Linux distro.
I switched to it around 4 years ago and everything seemed to work except that I had this issue where if a game was running for 30 minutes or longer, it would progressively run worse and worse until it either crashed or I would just restart it. Didn't really find any solution online, the issue didn't happen on windows so I just switched back after 2 weeks.
Half a year later I decided to give it another shot, but I had a completely different issue I couldn't figure out how to fix, so I switched away from it 3 days later to Mint. Switched back to Windows a day later because I wasn't much of a fan of apt when compared to pacman, and arch (what Manjaro is based on) is this mythical distro that's very hard to install and use, so I didn't bother.
Then another half a year later I switched to arch and stuck to it, with minor distro hopping here and there but always came back to arch. Thanks to Manjaro, I knew pacman commands and had overcome the fear of the terminal, which did make the switch to arch much easier.
That being said, my opinion is that you should at the very least try it. If the distro gives you no problems - fantastic, but if gives you major issues like in my case, then at least you get to familiarize yourself with arch-based distributions and maybe try EndeavourOS or Arch in the future.
Don't even bother with Manjaro tbh.
Manjaro is training wheels except when it's time to take them off you realize they're super-glued in place
I like it a lot. It gives you the arch experience without the hassle of installing it.
I’ve been running it for a few years. I’ve learned the hard way to not use the AUR. Manjaro breaks AUR software installs with its delayed release schedule. I’m running it now with pretty much all flatpaks and it’s MUCH more stable. So if you do run it, stay away from native AUR and opt for flatpaks instead.
The next time it breaks I’ll finally get motivated, nuke the drive, and install arch again (I liked arch better).
I think I have the skills now to keep an arch box alive, if you don’t have those skills then manjaro won’t really solve that problem either imo. Just go mint or something similar.
By far the number one reason to use Arch or an Arch derivative is the AUR. Saying that you have learned the hard way not to use the AUR on Manjaro is saying that Manjaro is not delivering on its promises. I agree with you btw, using the AUR on Manjaro is not safe as Manjaro packages are out of sync with Arch and the AUR was designed for Arch packages.
EndevourOS provides most of the same advantages as Manjaro but is 100% AUR compatible as ( one installed ) EndevourOS is really just Arch.
If you do not like command-line package management, check out pacseek.
I used to use it on my laptop and found it to be stable and solid. I never encountered any of the theoretical issues people brandish about. The GUI app store was really good (pamac) and frankly if it was included with EndeavourOS it would be perfect and I could recommend EOS to anyone; without the GUI app store EOS really are intentionally limiting how popular they could be. The default wallpapers were a little bland.
I switched to endeavour as when wanting to move away from Ubuntu on my desktop Manjaro didn't like my multi monitor setup (and nor did anything else I tried other than EndeavourOS and Ubuntu). If that had worked I might still be using it now.
I would also like a GUI installer on EOS but I no longer like pamac.
You can install pamac on EOS no problem as it is in the AUR and yay is installed by default in EOS. So, it is just yay -S pamac-gtk
But, please do not install pamac on EOS.
A really great alternative is pacseek. It offers a text user interface ( TUI ). Give it a shot.
Manjaro is bullshit
That's not strong enough of an expletive.
The only good think of that distro is their green color.
I'm not a distro hopper, but 6 years ago I ditched Windows and chose Manjaro in the i3wm flavor.
I learned a lot initially and now "live in the terminal" whenever possible and I'm still using the same install.
If you want to learn more about linux, I can recommend it.
lDK if straight arch is better (as i've never used it) but I think I kinda prefer not having a constant flood of updates.
You are literally me.
Though after my introduction to Manjaro with i3, I switched to EndeavourOS with BSPWM.
Its ok. The logo looks crap but it has everything I needed already installed where other distros required me to configure or set stuff up. I've had no manjaro related issues over the last 2 years and it's the only distro that hasn't come with an issue out of the box.
Pop os and mint are great I don't think they should be written off just because they're Ubuntu based. Fedora is solid, endeavor and Garuda are arch based and good as well. All the people saying arch requires no setup now that it has an installer are wrong. It will set you up with a barebones system and you'll have to customize from there which can be a hassle if you aren't familiar with linux.
I don't understand the hate. I have been using Manjaro as my sole OS on two machines (a Thinkpad with XFCE, a Surface with Gnome) for several years, and have never had any major problem. Everything just works. The same could be said of Mint (which I used to be on before Manjaro), but I enjoy having faster updates on Manjaro. So I guess, from experience, I am very happy with it.
I was forced to switch from manjaro to fedora at work a year ago (we were forced to pick between Ubuntu or Fedora) and I miss it. Things break more often on fedora, I now even lag 1 release behind so that I don't have to deal with breaking updates. I didn't have any problems with manjaro. Still use it at home
Curious to know what was broken on Fedora. My experience with Fedora has been very stable.
You have been using Fedora raw hide? On the latest stable Fedora releases thing break significantly less often than on Manjaro.
Most common are probably issues with login screen, e.g. not updating it, not showing login field input. I use x11+kde, same as it was on manjaro
I had more trouble in a few month of Manjaro on a secondary system than I had with Arch in over 15 years. The amount of conflicts I had to resolve during package updates was crazy. If I now want to set up a new system, I use EndeavorOS as a base. Quick install procedure but I end up with something very close to Arch.
Seconding EndeavourOS as an alternative, I used to use Manjaro and eventually the dependency conflicts (because every non-AUR package is about 2-weeks out-of-date) drove me insane enough to switch to Endeavour. I haven't had a problem with the exception of a broken grub update last year, which AFAIK wasn't just an EndeavourOS problem and they've since taken action to prevent something like that from occurring again.
It's mostly fine but has had enough issues over the years I stopped using it for my "I want arch but I'm lazy" distro. Arch itself is really not hard to install these days but if you find it too intimidating endeavor is basically just arch anyway but with an installer.
Speaking of arch-installer there is an install script included with arch that can get you to the graphical desktop of your choice with little input. I used it for my current install and it was very easy.
Flawless on my thinkpad T480, occasionaly some issues on my gaming PC usually nvidia drivers post update but not as much lately
I've been using Manjaro (XFCE edition) as my daily driver, both on a laptop and a desktop system for more than 6 years now. I've tried many others beforehand: Ubuntu and its variations, Arch, Fedora, Tumbleweed, ...
But Manjaro was what made me stop hopping around. While it's true that it has some pitfalls (e.g. cert issues, AUR incompatibility at times), to this day it's working well enough for me that I don't feel like switching away.
I'm not just browsing web on it either. Software engineering, music production, image and video processing, etc.
Then again, I don't consider myself a beginner at this point and can troubleshoot a fair amount of issues now that I simply couldn't when I started using Linux more than a decade ago.
I also try to:
I also always appreciated the fact that I could get away with not doing a system update for like six weeks and then do a big one (as mentioned, in combination with reading their update announcement). That's always something that didn't quite work for me on Arch in the past (then again, I still was a beginner back then, so most "reinstall to solve this problem" situations back then were on me).
What if Manjaro really would get worse enough so I'd want to switch? I guess EndeavourOS would be an option, because it's very close to Arch, but at the same time, it seemingly offers a graphical installer that hopefully will set itself up properly on a laptop. Then again, I haven't installed Arch in quite a while now. Maybe the install experience has gotten much nicer.
I used to use it. I updated and twice on mobile, twice on desktop, it broke my OS. I wouldn't touch it again.
Mint is great. Your specification is quite restrictive and will potentially open you up to suffering. Mint doesn't use snaps so not sure why you'd want to avoid.
I've used Manjaro it went and died on me so now I just run arch