I used Manjaro for a few years before switching to Arch. Manjaro finds a nice sweespot for “Arch but also nice”. Furthermore, Arch has gotten much more user friendly in the last 5 years or so. Back in late 2010s, Manjaro was adding a lot of value on top of Arch.
What really bothered me about Manjaro was the “forum cops” they employ, who are super aggressive to newcomers and unhelpful. It was not a nice experience to seek help. Say what you will about Arch people, they are at least helpful.
I finally switched to Arch when I got my new machine. I recommend the same.
If someone still wants “Arch but also nice,” I’d point them at Garuda tbh. I really liked it but the rolling updates kept breaking my NVIDIA drivers. If not for that I might still be using it.
I had Debian and was not satisfied with the fact that I had to wait ages for updates of stuff like KDE Plasma. I wanted something with shorter update intervals.
I decided against Ubuntu because of the company behind it.
I decided against Mint, because it’s on level 3 in the derivate tree, so more places where something can go wrong.
Then I found Manjaro and liked it from the beginning. Very easy to install (no script necessary), awesome custom Plasma theme, short update intervals, …
Arch can be scary. I wanted a reliable, easy OS for private use and I knew, I get that with Manjaro. With Arch, I was not sure whether I might FCK something up.
from what ive heard of manjaro, they do less testing on new packages than arch. also, nothing on arch ever broke my pc except for the clock, which was probably because i configured it wrong (didn’t use archinstall).
only time an update has ever done anything bad was like a week ago when plasma 6.6 launched and the login freezed the pc, but that was on cachyos, not main arch.
i wouldn’t call myself a Linux newbie, and I use CachyOS out of necessity (I have an ASUS laptop), and I’m perfectly content to introduce myself as way too lazy to do it the “proper” Arch way. Maybe someday.
Yeah, I’m not defending Manjaro, they are too sloppy for me to do that. Rather EndeavourOS and CachyOS and similar which either give you a working Arch install with minimal effort or add something that may be of value to Arch. That said, the Manjaro distro itself is pretty good, especially if you swap the unstable repos which mirror the Arch ones. Kind of defeats the point of Manjaro though.
Manjaro differs from Arch in terms of update cycles. They are not rolling like Arch but adhere to some monthly-ish release cycle. Which i love by the way.
Those cycles are meant for testing a coherent set of versions. If you update Arch on a monthly basis I’m not quite sure you got the same testing. I’ve been running Manjaro for 8 years now (laptop for business and family stuff) and I can’t remember any issue with it. I also have Endeavour and Debian on my desktop (gaming / casual) and server.
All you said is factually correct but I never had any issue with aur and Manjaro. It seems the issue is more theoretical than anything. On the other side, there are plenty of situations where I don’t want to have frequent 1Gb updates that don’t bring many benefits.
Back in 2015 for gaming PC: Steam and Nvidia driver updates via package manager, Xfce (used it before on multiple laptops), promise to be more stable than vanilla arch.
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I used Manjaro for a few years before switching to Arch. Manjaro finds a nice sweespot for “Arch but also nice”. Furthermore, Arch has gotten much more user friendly in the last 5 years or so. Back in late 2010s, Manjaro was adding a lot of value on top of Arch.
What really bothered me about Manjaro was the “forum cops” they employ, who are super aggressive to newcomers and unhelpful. It was not a nice experience to seek help. Say what you will about Arch people, they are at least helpful.
I finally switched to Arch when I got my new machine. I recommend the same.
If someone still wants “Arch but also nice,” I’d point them at Garuda tbh. I really liked it but the rolling updates kept breaking my NVIDIA drivers. If not for that I might still be using it.
My thinking process years ago was:
I had Debian and was not satisfied with the fact that I had to wait ages for updates of stuff like KDE Plasma. I wanted something with shorter update intervals.
I decided against Ubuntu because of the company behind it.
I decided against Mint, because it’s on level 3 in the derivate tree, so more places where something can go wrong.
Then I found Manjaro and liked it from the beginning. Very easy to install (no script necessary), awesome custom Plasma theme, short update intervals, …
Arch can be scary. I wanted a reliable, easy OS for private use and I knew, I get that with Manjaro. With Arch, I was not sure whether I might FCK something up.
from what ive heard of manjaro, they do less testing on new packages than arch. also, nothing on arch ever broke my pc except for the clock, which was probably because i configured it wrong (didn’t use archinstall).
only time an update has ever done anything bad was like a week ago when plasma 6.6 launched and the login freezed the pc, but that was on cachyos, not main arch.
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There’s the difference, you don’t have to set the derivative up.
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i wouldn’t call myself a Linux newbie, and I use CachyOS out of necessity (I have an ASUS laptop), and I’m perfectly content to introduce myself as way too lazy to do it the “proper” Arch way. Maybe someday.
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Yeah, I’m not defending Manjaro, they are too sloppy for me to do that. Rather EndeavourOS and CachyOS and similar which either give you a working Arch install with minimal effort or add something that may be of value to Arch. That said, the Manjaro distro itself is pretty good, especially if you swap the unstable repos which mirror the Arch ones. Kind of defeats the point of Manjaro though.
I think, I haven’t had any mentionable problem with Manjaro over multiple years.
Manjaro differs from Arch in terms of update cycles. They are not rolling like Arch but adhere to some monthly-ish release cycle. Which i love by the way.
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Those cycles are meant for testing a coherent set of versions. If you update Arch on a monthly basis I’m not quite sure you got the same testing. I’ve been running Manjaro for 8 years now (laptop for business and family stuff) and I can’t remember any issue with it. I also have Endeavour and Debian on my desktop (gaming / casual) and server.
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All you said is factually correct but I never had any issue with aur and Manjaro. It seems the issue is more theoretical than anything. On the other side, there are plenty of situations where I don’t want to have frequent 1Gb updates that don’t bring many benefits.
Back in 2015 for gaming PC: Steam and Nvidia driver updates via package manager, Xfce (used it before on multiple laptops), promise to be more stable than vanilla arch.