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

Never used it, but in my mind it will always be the distribution that told its users to roll the date on their machines back because they forgot to renew their website’s SSL certificate.

Twice.

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

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 enjoy Manjaro and I would even say its the reason I switched to linux (I didn’t like the other distros) but I’ve had updates that brick my operating system however this isnt so much of a problem for me now since i back up my data and use timeshift now.

I think most of the Manjaro hate comes from people comparing it to arch linux

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 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 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.

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.

I’ve been using Manjaro for years and find it to be a solid distro to do your daily stuff. Running it with KDE on Wayland and its super smooth. Pretty much keep it up to date often and use pamac to update instead of pacman and things tend to go well.

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 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.

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.

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.