What is your unbiased opinion on Manjaro?

I am a Linux noobie and have only used Mint for around six months now. While I have definitely learned a lot, I don't have the time to always be doing crazy power user stuff and just want something that works out of the box.
While I love Mint, I want to try out other decently easy to use distros as well, specifically not based on Ubuntu, so no Pop OS.
Is Manjaro a possibly good distro for me to check out?

boomer ,
@boomer@beehaw.org avatar

You cannot get an unbiased opinion asking on reddit or especially lemmy since this is where predominantly fedora and arch purists live.

What you will see is Fedora users hate Manjaro's popularity because they are in direct competition. Fedora is the downstream of RHL just as Ubuntu is downstream of Debian and Manjaro is Downstream of Arch. RPM and RHL just have not gained traction over the years from new users due to Debian and Arch dominance.

Second are the Arch purists who will tell you that Manjaro is not arch since similarly Ubuntu is not debian. But what happens is you get tons of newbs coming to Arch and in the support forums and arch purists realize that Manjaro has a popularity which makes them jealous. Similar to how debian purists act towards ubuntu newbs .

The thing is, when a big team and community establish a polished down stream service, it will always be more popular and more polished than the upstream since it is building on what the upstream have already provided.

Manjaro is amazing . They really are the ubuntu of arch.

A fedora or arch purist cannot handle those words and will have to find something that happened while back with SSL keys getting miss managed or experimentors who mix a ton of AUR packages with their testing branches etc.

Well ubuntu users screw up their systems when they mix a bunch of debian packages into it. Same thing.

Manjaro to be honesty is frankly killing it. Amazing team and stable rolling downstream arch for newbs. They have three streams, unstable, testing and stable. I've been on stable for years with zero issues. I've got a few AUR packages which build easily . Plus new users get adequately warned when adding AUR packages and mostly it is not necessary since manjaro provides everything in their repos anyways. Installing flatpaks are a sinch and even git packages through the AUR.

The interface is also amazingly polished and I LOVE the ease they give you of installing newer or older kernels.

Tovervlag ,

Opinions are always biased.

foobarijk ,

I've installed Arch, Arcos and Manjaro (from the Arch based distros).
Manjaro and Arcos are faster and easier to install and setup compared to Arch.
Manjaro has nice GUI to select kernel, GPU drivers and install software (and does not automatically move you to the newest kernel, as opposed to Arch or Arcos).
They had fucked up (I think 3 times) with renewing their SSL certificate, and for a short while their ISOs were unverifiable (not that big of an issue if you ask me).
Since they delay their packages' updates, running them in testing for a few months for extra stability, installing from AUR is bound to break.

I've installed Manjaro on 3 computers, and worked with it extensively for about 3 years. It's a decent distro that doesn't deserve all the hate it gets.

jakob ,
@jakob@lemmy.schuerz.at avatar

What is your biased opinion on having unbiased opinions?

aman25ta ,

Was my first distro and used it for years without isses

Loved it

nieceandtows ,

I used manjaro for a long while before I distro hopped and I think it’s a fine distro. Never had any problems with it. People keep pointing to the couple of times when it had some certificate issues. I don’t think it’s very relevant, and I only had positive things to say while I was using it.

air_filter ,

I've had more success with Manjaro than any other distro. I've gotten lots of software working because of the great package manager, all using a GUI. I think it's really easy to use and at the same time really flexible and powerful. I've tried to install Arch twice and failed both times. I guess I'm an idiot. Manjaro is easy to install and you get all the power a flexibility of Arch's package management.

zephr_c ,
@zephr_c@lemm.ee avatar

What even is an unbiased opinion? That doesn't even begin to make sense.

That being said, my very biased opinion is that it's a great way to install Arch without learning how Arch works so that when it inevitably breaks you don't even know how to ask the right questions.

banazir ,
@banazir@lemmy.ml avatar

"Unbiased opinion" is an oxymoron.

zarkony ,

I disagree. Not everyone wants to spend the time to completely customize their system. Distros like Manjaro and Endeavor give people a decent "just works" install while still giving them experience with the Arch ecosystem. The forums are usually a good resource, and everything on the arch wiki still applies. It might just be because I had previous linux experience, but I've learned a lot running Manjaro.

The average person is not going to jump straight into vanilla Arch as their first distro, but after a couple years with Manjaro, they might try it.

ulkesh ,
@ulkesh@beehaw.org avatar

I run Manjaro as my gaming rig and have had no real issues.

boomer ,
@boomer@beehaw.org avatar

Manjaro rocks! Fedora and Arch purists just can't accept it 🥲 boohoo . A sea of tears.

ulkesh ,
@ulkesh@beehaw.org avatar

It does! But I recently gave Bazzite a try...yeah I'm not ready for this so-called atomic distro (it's based on Fedora). I'm now, for the moment, settled on Garuda Linux (based on Arch). I'm liking it thus far, but if anything goes awry, I may head back to Manjaro. Garuda is much closer to Arch prime (running 6.8.9 linux-zen kernel where Manjaro is on 6.6.x still). And the chaotic-aur is actually kinda nice. Time will tell if I stick with it!

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