this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2023
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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.
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Edit: This is true even for Arch linux, as the Aur package might be out of date.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.
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.
That's not how source packages work. The only way they'd break is in case of major upstream changes. Which do happen, but the only inconvenience would be recompiling the package. Which you're supposed to do anyway.
Do you reinstall your AUR packages after an update? If yes, you will never see them break on Manjaro or Arch. If you don't, they will break on both Manjaro and Arch.
I am not theorizing. And I am not taking about source code not compiling. I am talking about dependencies which includes the reports version numbers and version number expectations of packages maintained by different parties. Those broke all the time for me on Manjaro and it was often because of the differences between what was in the Arch repos vs the Manjaro repos.
When Manjaro fell behind at one point, I ended up with a version of GEGL ( labeled - git ) being pulled from the AUR. Later releases of GIMP refused to upgrade over that version of GEGL. I just lived with it for a few months hoping it would clear itself up but it never did. I basically had to back everything my out and install again. Not that it was hard but these kinds of annoyances happened for me all the time on Mnajaro and basically never on EbdeavourOS or Arch.
What made me move away from Manjaro to begin with were all the problems it had with the dotnet packages at the time. I blamed dotnet and the AUR and was amazed that the problems went away when I used EndeavourOS instead.
If what you describe were true it would make AUR packages fail (on any Arch distro) if the user failed to upgrade their system each time, every time an update came out. The two week delay practiced by Manjaro is a completely arbitrary period of timen in the grand scheme of things. There are users who only upgrade once a month or even more seldom and nothing like this happens to them.
You will see that the aur package will use a git version and you will also be asked to remove the conflicting package when you are installing a git version.
And once again, this isn't unique to manjaro, on my arch install yuzu broke because they were using dynarmic from the aur instead of using the one provided by yuzu itself.
Also gimp and gegl are already on both the arch and manjaro official repos, If you are using git packages and you don't update them lots of things will break regardless if you are on any arch distro.
Now I wonder if pamac checks for updates of git packages by default, because your git packages will not be updated unless you explicitly tell yay to do so (yay --devel) I think paru every does it automatically with every update but then again most people will use yay instead.
My experience has been quite the opposite, a few months ago my install broke to the point that I could not update the system, turns out it was because of the arch migration and my system wasn't incorporating the new pacman.conf.new.
Endeavour is basically Arch but with bling out of the box & an easier installer....
What bling¿? I thought endeavorOS was very minimalist as well. Just arch with an easier installer
Bling as in pre-installed themes....
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.
Oh, bullshit.
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.
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.
Been using Manjaro with the AUR for 3 years, never had the breakage you described.