this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2026
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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.
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:
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.
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.