Linux

As Chris Titus once said “why install Manjaro when you can install arch" I used to daily manjaro but stuff broke and if you do decide to use manjaro don't use the AUR if you don't know what your doing

Every time I use Manjaro something horribly breaks. It's odd though because I daily drive endeavour now and it's been rock solid with no issues other than my own stupidity in partitioning my drives. I would stay away from Manjaro personally and use endeavour if you're dedicated to arch. If you want a rolling release distro then rhino Linux just released their first major version and it's a rolling release Ubuntu distro. Either way my opinion is the same, Manjaro was good for it's time, but it's been overshadowed and buried by other arch distros that are way more stable.

I don't know much about the console and such magic which probably makes me not exactly predestined for an Arch-based distro with the AUR where I feel like you can break more than in some more common ones like Mint. Despite that, I have been on Manjaro for years now, still learned only the very basics, but have not found a more stable distro that works so well out-of-the-box with some of the newer hardware I have (or had, it's hardly new anymore). Also, I did in fact find the repos combined with careful use of the AUR to be satisfying.

I did distro-hop a lot especially in the beginning of my Linux adventure and was on Mint for a couple of years as well. And that's what I generally recommend to the other non-tech-savvy folks around me as well: Just try a bunch of the top distros on Distrowatch for a couple of weeks. They all have their advantages and disadvantages but eventually you'll figure out what it really is that you want from a distro and which ones work properly with your hardware – and you'll learn about some fixes for common issues which helps the learning about Linux in general.

There are probably folks who know much more than me who can tell you if Manjaro is objectively better than its bad reputation but from my personal experience as a fellow Linux noob: I found it very stable, decently accessible and the KDE spin with its many themes absolutely beautiful.

I have other thoughts, but these are the most objective ones:

• The theme was integrated with all applications I tried and I didn't spot any problems with it. (I'd tell you I liked it, but that would be subjective)
• Installing via Pamac required knowing what source (repos, AUR, et cetera) you were installing from or to try multiple.
• My Brother wifi printer couldn't connect and I didn't find a guide to resolve it.
• I couldn't get audio to work correctly on my Thinkpad X1 Carbon 9th Gen.
• The forums seemed to be active.
• I ran it for a week in a VM without breaking anything. Didn't run for any length of time on bare metal due to the printer and sound issues.

Compared to Fedora and EndeavorOS:

• Default GNOME theming, of course also through.
• GNOME Store will show you all available sources when you search for the package on Fedora. For EndeavorOS I have to search two places on archlinux.org and flathub.
• My printer worked with Fedora out of the box. For EndeavorOS I found a detailed guide they put together.
• No audio issues on either.
• Fedora also has a large forum. The EndeavorOS forum seems to have fewer users.
• I ran Fedora on my laptop for 6 months. When I upgraded between versions, I ended up with two versions of some applications like "Terminal" and "GNOME Terminal," which was confusing. No breakages.
• I've been running EndeavorOS for 14 months. I broke GRUB when everyone else on Arch and EndeavorOS did. I still had the live USB, and EndeavorOS provided instructions on how to fix it, although it was written for Ext4 and I had to make some educated guesses since I use BTRFS. I was successful and that was my only breakage.

I haven't used Manjaro in years so my experiences are not up to date, but from my experiences it always felt unpolished and somewhat amateurish compared to other distributions, especially compared to Arch.

I've made Arch crash many times but part of their ideology is that Arch "is as stable as your are". So when I made Arch crash it always felt like a fault of my own.

Manjaro, however, that has marketed itself as a new user friendly distro borked itself after updates just as often as Arch. Back in the day at least. For a newbie oriented distro I don't think this is excusable.

Then Manjaro has done some really weird choices over the years, like with them shipping a proprietary office suite. As well as them not renewing their SSL certs in time for their forum. Several times...

Still, I don't like the idea of point release operating systems so I've always kept to rolling release systems, and if you want a solid rolling release then I have to recommend OpenSuse Tumbleweed. Haven't crashed even once in the 5+ years I've been using it on several PC's and servers (in the form of MicroOS).

It's been good for me. It has broke a couple of times, but it seemed pretty in par for any Linux distro. For me it was time to re-install. It has a cool package called "gnome-layout-switcher" that mimics popular desktops.

I moved because Debian was somewhat boring, Ubuntu was busy trying to make stuff nobody wanted. RPM based distros were bought by Oracle or IBM and felt like "old hat", ha ha sorry. Arch was the goal but I was feeling lazy so Manjaro it was. I'll probably try another Arch based distro because pacman tools are pretty good.

distro for noobs