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Manjaro 2.0 Manifesto (forum.manjaro.org)
submitted 7 months ago by to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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[–] 6 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (7 children)

Neither CachyOS nor EndeavourOS get out of the way same as Manjaro. CachyOS doesn't even ship with app store by default, which is an immediate yuck for someone who needs a "just conveniently works out of the box" distro.

Manjaro is the only Arch derivative that allows you to never even think you have Arch under the hood. It has all sorts of QoL improvements and graphical settings for everything, it has a smooth and beautiful integration of all package sources (something Arch is notoriously bad with), and if you don't need AUR, package delay prevents breaking changes, helping you not to think about managing your system.

Manjaro is not for everyone, and it will definitely not satisfy a typical Arch demographic, as it's made with different people in mind. Hence such an opinionated take on your side. Recent management issues don't help, either, but that's exactly what they're trying to take action against.

In any case, it was Manjaro that served as my gateway to Linux, and it couldn't have been smoother. No other distro I played around made me feel confident in switching.

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  • [–] 4 points 7 months ago (6 children)

    My recommendation for someone that needs an appstore with a gui is fedora, manjaro is terrible for this, because they have an appstore that regularly breaks and requires cli intervention anyway, if having a gui for package management is important to you manjaro is a terrible choice, as is arch in general.

    read some of the comments here, this is not uncommon, and it's a fundamental issue with the design of arch package management that has been completely resolved elsewhere.

    No, I do not agree at all that that is a valid usecase for manjaro. Anybody who needs a distro that works out of the box and is convenient shouldn't even be considering anything arch based.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago (5 children)

    Fedora is way more involved than Manjaro, and I wouldn't recommend it to newbies.

    First time I touched Fedora (that was 1,5 years into my Linux journey), I immediately borked it very hard when trying to install Nvidia drivers. For about a year that I used it since, it has shown itself as a generally stable, but involved distro that allows the user to shoot themselves in a foot and doesn't shy away from turning folks to terminal. So, it's decent for experienced users, but it's certainly not for everyone, and especially not for newbies.

    So, what do you propose for newbies? Ubuntu, with all its dumpster fire? Mint, that, for all its merits, stubbornly refuses modern frameworks? Debian, that will have a newbie drown in documentation? Manjaro isn't perfect, and there are negatives to write about it as well, but it relies on Arch for good reasons that are often omitted. Arch is truly community-based, rolling release, highly supported, and very fast, which allows to bring all the recent niceties of Linux to any and all machines, no matter how close they are to the potato and how new the user is to the ecosystem.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago (4 children)

    you're right, I oversimplified, bazzite is great because it's unhindered by patents and preinstalls the drivers, I'd recommend a community fedora fork, the key being that it's much easier to turn fedora into this than arch.

    manjaro is this but with way more footguns, I say this having maintained a bunch of manjaro systems for people, switching them to bazzite fixed nearly all of my maintenance burden, because it's easy to remove them from fedora but impossible with arch, intentionally, and by design.

    If you want something easy that just works arch is very deliberately designed to not be that, on purpose, even.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago* (3 children)

    Bazzite is good indeed, we can agree here. My main issue with it is exactly what makes it good for many - namely, immutability.

    On the upside, it does indeed remove a lot of footguns. It's much harder to actually bork your immutable install (although it is possible, I did once manage to cause seemingly irreversible damage to Aurora, which is another Fedora-based immutable).

    On the downside, it takes different approaches to management and system administration compared to regular mutable distros. This makes troubleshooting more complicated, as a lot of general Linux solutions just won't work. Also, some things still stubbornly refuse to work on an immutable distro. I recognize a lot of this is growing pains, but they are currently there.

    Currently, I strike a good balance with OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. It is exceptionally stable for a rolling release distribution, it is mutable, and at the same time, it has extensive automatic snapshots and easy recovery. So, whatever you manage to break, you can roll it back. Still, I wouldn't recommend it to newbies in my right mind, because, just like Fedora, it still expects the user to know what they're doing, and is quite terminal-intensive. Maybe it could be forked into something newbie-friendly, and it would make a strong rival to Manjaro.

    There's one more aspect for me personally, though. Debian and Arch are the only two upstreams that are:

    • Entirely community-driven (so suffer much less from corporate influence, and are better from the Linux "freedom" standpoint compared to Fedora, OpenSUSE, etc.)
    • Widely adopted (have extensive communities supporting the repos, a large knowledge base and active forums)
    • Not heavily opinionated (allow proprietary programs, work with systemd, etc.)

    Debian has a very slow release schedule, and as I do appreciate more frequent updates, I'm pretty much squeezed into Arch territory. And in there, Manjaro comes with least technical expertise expected of the user, and with the most user-friendly approach. And if not for some weird issues I have with all Arch distros on my particular machine, I would consider running Manjaro to this day.

    Oh, and on the impossibility of removing footguns from Arch: KDE actually works on immutable Arch, which must be very low-maintenance, so we'll see how it goes.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago (2 children)

    If you don't like the immutability then use nobara.

    Tbh I don't think the issues with immutability are CURRENTLY there.

    you said this:

    "Entirely community-driven (so suffer much less from corporate influence, and are better from the Linux "freedom" standpoint compared to Fedora, OpenSUSE, etc.)"

    give me one example of a time this mattered

    "Widely adopted (have extensive communities supporting the repos, a large knowledge base and active forums)"

    fedora obviously has this.

    "Not heavily opinionated (allow proprietary programs, work with systemd, etc.)" And this.

    i conclude that you have still not made any case that there is even one reason to use manjaro that isn't the cost of switching.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 child)

    Give me one example of a time mattered

    CentOS and the way it was killed, managed by same team that manages Fedora, alongside the rest of Red Hat drama. Outside of Fedora, Canonical has made numerous breaking changes to Ubuntu, most notably by pushing snap down users' throats and rolling out Ubuntu Pro, putting not only extended updates, but also vital security features behind a paywall. Part of the reason I opted for Tumbleweed is because SUSE is least prone to such acts - but it's still a questionable arrangement in the long run.

    All in all, I agree to disagree. We may just conclude that you personally have no reason to prefer Manjaro, especially since you had to manage it for others (which is not something I face), and that's fine. I only interjected because you are very generous at extending your preferences and understanding on others.

    I like to have Manjaro as an option. And I don't mind Nobara, Bazzite or something else entirely - they have their userbase, and I'm happy the latter works for your needs.

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