Manjaro is what happens when you have a really nice installer for arch linux and some neat extras; but it's made by people who looked at a 20 minute youtube tutorial about the subject and think they're now the best in their subject even though they barely know how to refresh their own domain name.

if you want an arch-like experience use something like XeroxLinux, arco linux, or EndeavourOS instead, they all have their own place in the arch space and are way better at teaching you how to actually use and maintain your system rather than throw some system at it that will break because it is barely maintained and arch is a rolling release distro.

Brodie Robertson on youtube did a series of videos on the different fuckups by the manjaro team ranging from not refreshing their domain name, DDOS-ing the AUR with their tooling, and pushing broken patches upstream with a rat's ass of knowledge of what's actually going on.

I heard that the maintainers let some important web certificates expire, which is a big no-no.

It has no meaningful place or benefits and everyone defending it seems to just be saying "erm, well why not!" and ignoring the problems its caused when compared to distros like endeavouros

I tried it on bare metal some years ago. The main issue I had was that it wasn’t very stable and I kept running into bugs that made the system hard to use. I’m sure they have fixed that by now but that was my experience.

I have heard things previously about Manjaro that make me want to avoid it.

OTOH, as an Arch user, some of the things I feel could use improvement are better with Manjaro. Pretty much every Arch derivative does something about the major pain points of Arch, though, slapping on a installation gui (though, honestly, just advertising the archinstall CLI script that's on the install usb stick and fixing it up a bit would help Arch), and giving you an AUR helper by default.

I recently tried the XFCE version of Endeavor in a vm, and I quite like it, so if I move from Arch, I'm more inclined to go that direction.

I see some people say Manjaro has no place--to just use Arch or some other easier to use distro. IMO the more linux distros the better. I think many believe that more distros means its harder to get support, but using linux is also about being resourceful, and many things other distro communities have solved can be utilized in other distros.

Innovations that Manjaro makes can have an impact on their upstream, and the linux community as a whole. It fills a niche that might get someone to use linux that otherwise wouldn't. At the end of the day what helps out all of the linux community is the number of users.

Opinion you said?... https://manjarno.snorlax.sh/

Thankfully the Manjaro team didn't seem to have a major mess-up recently, but they did have some very troubled past. Especially now that Arch has a real installer that bundles entire DEs for you, the premise of using an "Arch Linux but easy to use" OS seems less and less

To each their own though! Nothing wrong with using Manjaro at all if someone really likes it

I ran it in a virtual once and liked it well enough.

The main difference I can see between Arch and Manjaro so far is I can install Manjaro and get a bootable system. :-) So far Arch has defeated me. My most recent attempt was with archlinux-2022.12.01-x86_64.iso (twice). The image sits in my temp dir mocking me.

It is ultimately your choice, but from the many instances of poor communication, carelessness or whatever it was, I can't personally recommend it.

Even from a new user viewpoint they are often not helpful, reverting to rtfm, something that is expected on base arch, but not on something that supposedly wants to be preinstalled on hardware.

I wish them the best and hope that the ship eventually sails without hiccups.

It seems alright but I've seen a lot of issues.

Back when I contributed to ALMA - we'd constantly get issues created by Manjaro users, as it wouldn't work due to Manjaro having the kernel package set up differently IIRC.

I'd just use Arch Linux tbh, it's only painful the first time.

I like the idea and used Manjaro for a few years, but its run by less competent people than Id like (or at least in comparison to other distros), so I stopped and moved to a different distro.

Manjaro had a rough history of not taking security seriously. I hope they have improved, but the impression stuck.

They have done a few things right by making Arch more approachable when Arch was more of a RTFM type distribution. Now Arch is easier and even ships with an installer, but Manjaro's installer is easy.

The end result is still that the user still needs to manage an Arch distro. I would recommend learning the Arch way from Arch instead of taking the easy road.

If you want an easy distro, rolling releases, and up-to-date packages, I would recommend Debian Did over Manjaro. If you want Arch, use Arch.

Manjaro is what got me into Arch so I'll always have a soft spot for it. I don't keep up with internet drama so much but I do remember people saying some stuff about the devs being shady/shitty. But I'm not sure how much truth there is to that.

I haven't used it but it's my go-to recommendation for Linux newbies. Partly because it's easy for me as an Arch user to solve their problems

I installed Manjaro sometime during 2018, and I have been using it without any major issues. The only issue I had is when AUR packages fail to update. I find that most of the time the issue will resolve itself eventually anyway. Overall, I feel that Manjaro is a nice and stable distro.

The only negative I can think of is the community. At the time, I was bluntly told to read the manual whenever I needed help or pointers. But, my negative experience was from a few years ago, so hopefully the community has improved today.

My daily driver distro today is Mint, which I think is more polished than Manjaro.

I doesn't deserve the hate it gets, it's not that big of a project but it's being treated like it pushed kids to kill themselves, the devs fucked up a few times and made some questionable decision (freeoffice...) but they put upe a nice working distro and aren't completely insane like the gnome/ubuntu devs

I use Manjaro ARM on my Orange PI because I couldn't get Arch ARM to work on it, while Manjaro has support of my devices out of the box. Since I installed a minimal possible version (without any DE), it doesn't feel bloated or something. It feels like I'm using Arch but with slower updates. Overall, it's good and I don't notice much difference from Arch. But anyway, I haven't tried it for a desktop station.

I don't know. I don't feel right if not arch like something missing

This site gives some reasons: https://manjarno.snorlax.sh/

Manjaro was the first Linux distro I used as a daily driver, from October 2020 to July 2021, when I switched to EndeavourOS. To be fair the main reason I switched was all those previous mess-ups by the developers and the troubled past, which I didn't know of when I moved to Linux. In the year or so I used it, I didn't have any messed update or crash myself.

I would say it's still a fine distro for beginners who want to try a rolling release (as EndeavourOS is imho better in every way, but it doesn't come with any GUI package manager so I wouldn't call it a distro for absolute beginners), but can't see any other usage case, as it's especially risky if you want to use packages from the AUR.

It's fine. Sometimes an update breaks the stuff installed via aur, that's fixable by issuing a command like that:

yay -S $(pacman -Qoq /usr/lib/python3.11) --answerclean All

Otherwise it works rocksolid. I've got it for 2 years on my thinkpad and no issues. Are there better Arch like distros? Probably. Would I choose another distro like Endeavour OS when I have to make fresh install? Probably. But until then, its okay.

I heard some security issues with it, can't confirm.

I used Manjaro for 7 years (until 2020) and I can say it's not that bad. However if you're gonna use AUR that's a big NO. Without using AUR it should be stable though they did screw things up, like big Nvidia purge, and when they become more frequent I bailed out. Using EndeavourOS for quite some time and couldn't be more happy. (I'm lazy to install Arch so Endeavour does its job perfectly.)

Too many instances of poor management, and the 2 week package delay issue.

Doesn’t seem to be a good reason to use it when Endeavour exists.

Irresponsible devs, delayed packages for no reason causing massive issues with ours and quite often invalid site certificates due to neglect. It's just arch but worse since it uses their repo which delays packages for practically no reason causing aur incompatibilities. Endeavour is a far better distro for beginners (or arch install script) with the exception of it not having pamac preinstalled.

I've been using it for nearly 3 years and encountered minimal issues. I'm using it on a Lenovo E14 all AMD laptop, mostly for gaming and web browsing.

Manjaro was my intro to Linux, but now that I know more about it, I can't recommend it in good conscience. Letting their SSL certs expire is something that happens (even though they could automate it), but telling their users to change their clocks so it works is a big no-no.

Worse than that is how they manage packages from upstream. Simply freezing them for two weeks is, in my opinion, the worst of both worlds. You don't get timely security updates, but you still end up with the issues of being on the bleeding edge - just late. It also means that if you use the AUR (which is really one of the biggest perks of Arch-based systems), it's possible that the necessary dependencies are out of date.

I think that if one wants "Arch with an installer" they should go with EndeavourOS, or try the archinstall script.