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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
EndeavourOS is such a good replacement for manjaro
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.
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.
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.
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Edit: This is true even for Arch linux, as the Aur package might be out of date.
Endeavour is basically Arch but with bling out of the box & an easier installer....
if your use the AUR with Manjaro, your system will break
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 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.
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.
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.
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!
Manjaro has graphical tools that make it super easy to manage packages, drivers and kernel versions.
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.
Fedora is great, very leading edge but stable AF
Manjaro for some reason can't stop breaking crap, and when they do break crap, they aren't exactly elegant about it
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.
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.
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.
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 🤷
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
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: nvidia and nvidia-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's linuxPackages attribute set that contains all packages that rely on a kernel ABI such as kernel modules or packages like perf. That's good design if you ask me but I'm obviously biased ;)
I know you need a new nvidia driver every time the kernel updates, but why keep 50 kernel versions? My beef was them offering so many (outdated) versions instead of keeping the latest one which would make things very simple for users (imo).
These aren't all versions per se but mostly variants, versions and versions of variants. For example, we have packaged the xanmod kernel which is a modified kernel optimised for desktop use but it has two variants: Main and LTS. We have packaged both.
Here are the names of all of our kernels currently to give you an idea (as a JSON list):
[
"linuxPackages",
"linuxPackages-libre",
"linuxPackages-rt",
"linuxPackages-rt_latest",
"linuxPackages_4_14",
"linuxPackages_4_19",
"linuxPackages_4_19_hardened",
"linuxPackages_4_9",
"linuxPackages_5_10",
"linuxPackages_5_10_hardened",
"linuxPackages_5_15",
"linuxPackages_5_15_hardened",
"linuxPackages_5_18",
"linuxPackages_5_19",
"linuxPackages_5_4",
"linuxPackages_5_4_hardened",
"linuxPackages_6_0",
"linuxPackages_6_1",
"linuxPackages_6_1_hardened",
"linuxPackages_6_2",
"linuxPackages_6_3",
"linuxPackages_6_4",
"linuxPackages_6_5",
"linuxPackages_6_5_hardened",
"linuxPackages_6_6",
"linuxPackages_custom",
"linuxPackages_custom_tinyconfig_kernel",
"linuxPackages_hardened",
"linuxPackages_latest",
"linuxPackages_latest-libre",
"linuxPackages_latest_hardened",
"linuxPackages_latest_xen_dom0",
"linuxPackages_latest_xen_dom0_hardened",
"linuxPackages_lqx",
"linuxPackages_rpi0",
"linuxPackages_rpi02w",
"linuxPackages_rpi1",
"linuxPackages_rpi2",
"linuxPackages_rpi3",
"linuxPackages_rpi4",
"linuxPackages_rt_5_10",
"linuxPackages_rt_5_15",
"linuxPackages_rt_5_4",
"linuxPackages_rt_6_1",
"linuxPackages_testing",
"linuxPackages_testing_bcachefs",
"linuxPackages_xanmod",
"linuxPackages_xanmod_latest",
"linuxPackages_xanmod_stable",
"linuxPackages_xen_dom0",
"linuxPackages_xen_dom0_hardened",
"linuxPackages_zen"
]
(Note that some of these are aliases; linuxPackages_latest is currently linuxPackages_6_6 for example.)
Each of these has the following nvidiaPackages (modulo incompatibilities):
[
"beta",
"dc",
"dc_520",
"latest",
"legacy_340",
"legacy_390",
"legacy_470",
"production",
"stable",
"vulkan_beta"
]
(Again, some of these are aliases.)
This is useful to have because users might have hardware constraints. It's not hard to imagine a scenario where a user might have a WiFi chip that only works with kernel ABIs < 5.4 and require the 470 nvidia driver for their old GPU. Packaging just the latest kernel and just the latest Nvidia driver would make this user unable to use their system.
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.
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.
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.
Agreed.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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).
Basically, the Manjaro team has no idea what they're doing.
The ManjarNO sheep can fuck off to Reddit for all I care.