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What Linux Distro would you recommend for general users?
(hexbear.net)
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I've been daily driving Manjaro on KDE for 8 years. People have philosophical problem with the way Manjaro is run, but for practical use it has been great. Manjaro is essentially Arch, so you can get all the bleeding edge Arch packages within weeks delay. The Manjaro team usually try to catch if there is a disastrous rolling update upstream. People usually accept that Arch breaks once a year or so, in my 8 years experience with Manjaro it broke twice. It will break even less if you don't update your packages as often, and for most users you don't need to have bleeding edge packages on kernel level (you can update your browser separately from whole system upgrade).
Arch snobs look down on Manjaro, and they made one mistake DDOSing the Arch repo that they will never live down. But I find that Manjaro has the right balance between the bleeding edge of rolling release and usability.
It's not just snobbery, the project is poorly run in some ways. But if it works, it works, I won't tell you you shouldn't use it.
My bad experiences with it are mostly niche issues with a certain device they supported, and conflicts they had with open source devs about pulling in unreleased, untested code fixes early, causing tons of bogus bug reports to be filed back with the upstream developers, but having their SSL certificates expire repeatedly wasn't confidence inspiring either, and in the meantime arch had improved somewhat in user-friendliness.
Arch still has its flaws (not allowing ARM packages in their repos/AUR is the big one for me, that shit sucks), so I don't really have a horse in this race. on servers I've come around to liking debian a lot after some recent experiences, but I gotta admit having a polished UI out of the gate is nice and back in the day at least, I didn't get that with arch or debian.
Ew fuck KDE. I forget what the really pretty one Manjaro usually comes with is called.
https://manjaro.org/products/download/x86 I've only ever used manjaro with KDE but I guess XFCE and GNOME are out there too