Is Manjaro Any Good?

Is Manjaro Good? And if so, who is it good for?
👇 PULL IT DOWN FOR THE GOOD STUFF 👇

===== Follow us 🐧🐧 ======

==== Special Thanks to Our Patrons! ====

==== Time Stamps ====
0:00 Intro
0:47 Do We Still Need Manjaro?
2:00 Is Manjaro More Stable?
2:50 Too Far Behind?
4:35 Community and Support
6:53 Problems with The Devs
8:39 The Good Things About Manjaro
9:03 The Stability
9:21 Look and Feel
9:48 Community Editions
10:34 Kernel and Driver Management
12:32 Kinda Minimal
15:24 My Conclusions: Is Manjaro Good?

#manjaro #linux #thelinuxcast

[sknfer]

Manjaro is the distro that got me into Linux 5 months ago, still using it, I like it

[thedeemon]

I've been on Manjaro for a year and it works nicely for me. Quite happy with it. Oblivious about its devs and support, I usually google for answers quickly, never ask questions myself.

[DominikLuebben]

I'm using Manjaro for several years now, and I must say I'm a big fan of it. In between I changed to Arch and Fedora for a while but both of them didn't really feel the way I want it. So I think it's always a matter of taste, but I love Manjaro. For me perosnally it's the best distro out there. I cannot really work with Fedora to be honest. I tried, but I couldn't like it the way most of the other people do. As I hear everywhere, Fedora is an aweseome distro. That might be so, but I can't confirm. I can confirm that Manjaro is indeed an awesome distro. And I also can confirm, that It's not Arch, and thats fine, because I only had issues with Arch, so that I way so fed up with that distro that I changed back. And I'm using Linux for 21 years now on a regular basis, so I wouldn't consider myself a "Noob".

[hosler]

the best thing about manjaro is how they allow you to enable different kernel flavors with just a click of a button. also i like how they use do device driver detection

[thingsiplay]

II used Ubuntu for 13 years and only switched the distribution once... to Manjaro. In a few months it will be the second year of using it. I am still on Manjaro, so it can't be that bad. But I lack experience in other distros.

[Deleteyourself]

Been using Manjaro (KDE Plasma Desktop) for over 2 years after distro hopping for around a year when I was a new Linux user. Tried lots of Debian based Distro's, started with Ubuntu (which I hated), Mint (Liked), MX (Liked), Pop (didn't like, not a fan of the GNOME desktops generally), etc, tried Fedora.

I've ran into one or two issues with Manjaro but I've managed to resolve them, the Arch wiki and Manjaro forums are amazing for finding technical documentation & information when your trying to configure something or troubleshoot. I heavily use the AUR for software and switch to the latest Kernel when available.

I might change to Fedora Silverblue (Immutable file systems with Atomic updates, toolbox and all apps running as Flat packs/containers appears like it maybe the way forward) or do a base Arch install in the future, but as it is, I really don't have any need to switch right now as Manjaro works perfectly for my needs and I'm still really happy with it.

[ZersVoid]

I had a good few months with Manjaro.
I actually had no problems running it at all.
I definitely found it odd that packages were held back. If I were wanting the closer to Arch experience, it was a bit odd. In that time I also learned about some of their missteps.

I am still within the "easy to install" distro camp of Arch with EndeavourOS.
Personally had a better experience getting support on EndeavourOS, but again that's personal anecdote.

[pinchtwo]

The kernel management software on Manjaro is really nice. Back when I ran Manjaro on an older laptop of mine, a kernel update half broke my system. It took me a little bit to figure out what the problem was but, once I diagnosed it, it was so simple to fix thanks to that tool.

[mc-not_escher]

I custom built my Manjaro system via Architect with btrfs + snapper, and KDE + Wayland and have had a great experience. Running on an old AMD A6-5200 APU for over three years and not much of a hiccup - a couple updates were missing bits and bobs but either a snapshot revert or a chroot update here or there was pretty painless thanks to the forums and wiki.

[Mage]

as someone starting to look hard at linux in general your content has been a blessing! <3

[MichaelCook-oolj]

I'm a Manjaro user and its very easy to enable the AUR. Manjaro is a very nice experience, I can use the AUR if I need something I can't otherwise find in the default repos but I have also never ended up with a bug or something broken which is great. Plus the WM/DE defaults that come with any Manjaro you download are pretty nice out of the box.

[grumpyken]

I was regifted an HP Stream 14 with 4gb RAM and 64gb of eMMC. with Windows 10. there was less than 10gb of storage available and it was a generally sluggish experience. I had not touched a Linux distro in probably 10 years and ran a few from a thumb drive to try them out. Manjaro was the first one that worked completely out of the box- all hardware, wifi, and even the hot keys without any input from me. I imaged the drive and installed it and never looked back. it is fast and slick and the only time I opened a terminal window was to find my network printer and setup CUPS. after installation it left me with 50gb of room on the flash storage. none of the negatives you mentioned have really affected me yet or are irrelevant to my use case. I am extremely impressed, blown away actually, at how far linux desktops have come. I am curious about Arch and would like to install it on another machine when I get some free time (and patience). anyway great info about Manjero I would not have known. thanks and subbed

[robonator]

if you want stability in arch, do two things, 1 : make AUR helpers like Yay warn the user about installing AUR packages/updates that havent been "signed off" by a reputable AUR user. So devs can take responsibility saying "yes, I have checked this package, it is safe" and if no-one has taken that responsibility for the package users get a "yes, I'm aware of the risks, I have read the pkgbuild, let me download it" warning

2 : FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, LET USERS SET A MINIMUM PACKAGE AGE FOR PACMAN PACKAGES. Even if I wait weeks between updates, someone could have broken GRUB 5 minutes ago. Let me, and other users, set a minimum age a package has to be out before we will download it. Let it be opt-in, let it be user configurable, I don't care, just bloody add it. It wouldn't break anything, it would just make your system perpetually X days out of date which, if you're being reasonable, wouldn't cause any issues. It wouldn't be complex, you just need to store a few backup versions of packages, and add a system to flag a package update as broken so that it will be skipped by people who update later and/or allow manual-intervention to be automated. (for instance, fixing the GRUB issue by letting pacman automatically do the required fixes for users once the issue was discovered) Is it work? Yes. But it's not that much, you need to maybe store a few extra versions of packages that get updated frequently, and add a way to flag a package as breaking so that pacman can skip it. That's it. Very little work and it would make Arch way more competitive. Think about it, you could set a server, to wait for packages to be out for 1-2 weeks before updating, and have it autoupdate. You could have, a stable, rolling release, server. Let the advanced users get true, day of release, bleeding edge packages, but not everyone needs packages THAT up to date. And, again, this is the exact same as just having a system perpetually X days out of date. Many arch users update every other WEEK, you're system won't break if it's 5 or 6 days out of date, this isn't holding back things for a month and causing all sorts of other issues, it's just being a touch out of date.

I have heard countless people try to argue why this is a bad idea, and not one of them have actually given a reason that held up beyond 5 seconds of scrutiny.

Arch doesn't have to be unstable, it doesn't have to be unsafe, you could have a perfectly seamless, decade long arch experience, with zero hiccups, just, let, people, have, the, right, tools.


Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

[neffscape]

I was a skeptical Manjaro user, I installed it 18 months ago for fun while seeking for another home when I ditched PopOS and I said to me "well, I'll try that and and hop to something better when it breaks". Long story short, I'm still waiting for it to break on me, and I've really come to love this distro. I come from a long history of debian and ubuntu based distros and this is the first rolling release distro I ever tried. I think that Manjaro is the best linux distro for ubuntu refugees looking for a stable enough but rolling release distro: pamac is beautiful if you come from apt, because it works the same way. Manjaro isn't exactly *bleeding edge*, but it isn't stale: the distro still features more updated packages than ubuntu interim releases, and you don't have to worry about upgrading. For me, running on the stable branch, it always worked flawlessly. I sometimes install AURs and they usually work OK. I know they are not designed for Manjaro, so I try to avoid them if I can. I also love that Manjaro is absolutely agnostic and enabling snaps and flatpaks is super easy and ready out of the box, so there's absolutely no need for other software sources. You did well explaining the dark side of the distro: I don't like their approach when dealing with some proprietary software in some of their flavors (vivaldi as default browser in the cinnamon edition and FreeOffice was proposed as default office suite in some of their distros in the past) and I don't like the community which is non existant, or really weak when compared with Ubuntu or Mint. I basically never found a nice blog about the project or someone to interact with to talk about the project. It's just something I use and I really enjoy. I wish it had a better circle around it. In the end I still disagree that manjaro is a nice option for absolute beginners: you won't find great support with it if you have issues and... it can still easily break it if you never used a Linux distro before. It's a nice intermediate choice for seasoned ubuntu users or for people that want a rolling release distro that "just works".

[Being_Joe]

It was nice, but I wised up and just went with Fedora.

[BytebroUK]

This is interesting history to me. Once upon a time, up until maybe around 2010 or so, I had a University CD for Win7 with an unlimited install key, so of course I just used it at home (children - don't do this; you might be sued and all!). Then that stopped when I "got a real job", and moved first to Mandriva at home. Then after a little while I installed Mageia. Then they started having arguments about all kinds of stuff including the whole systemd thing, and I moved to Ubuntu. I think that was around v12.04 LTS and all the devices in whatever machine I happened to have at the time just worked out of the box - new experience for me back then. Took me a while to get my head around changing from basically KDE to Gnome with Tweaks, but I'm still there.

Tried distro-hopping in VMs, but rarely had a good experience. I know everyone hates Ubuntu, but it bloody works, most of the time - I think by now I'm just a 'data-point' :)

Still looking for an installer that will make it trivial to put /home on a separate partition from /. Yes, you can do it of course, but it should be in there in the installer as part of the 'default' install, IMO.

[FAYZER]

When I installed arch and started exploring the AUR, I fell in love and never looked back

[xdevnull]

Good video. I used Manjaro for a few years and kind of gave up on it for the reasons you state. I think there is a bit of a myth than they just hold back on things a few days/weeks until they are sure they're "stable." A lot of stuff just gets rebundled and not really tested. Some things get fiddled with and released. So it is not just Arch a few weeks late, and it is certainly not more stable than Arch. The thing that finally made me give up on it was the gradual slow down of releases to the stable branch and how far major parts of the desktop were delayed for no reason. When I realized Fedora was more up to date - and a better integrated, more stable release - that was it for me. Manjaro has reasons for their update philosophy, and that's fine but it seems to have become the Ubuntu of Arch adjacent distros. Now I'm on Fedora and Garuda and find it more stable, less quirky, and more up to date with releases.

[Mikesco]

I've been daily driving Manjaro for about 3+ years as of the end of 2022 and it's been a fairly good ride.
Certainly bricked my system a lot less than Arch

[NOPerative]

Last 3 times I've installed Manjaro it's been problematic for me; each install was to fix the previous over the course of 3-4 months. Prior, had used Manjaro for almost 5 years - the longest I've ever used any distro. Installed EndeavourOS (XFCE version and NVidia drivers) and have been using it for roughly a month now without issue and have noticed that after re-installing Windows MSWin has been behaving itself much more too. The issues with Manjaro spanned across the KDE and Gnome environments so I do not fault the DM/DE - hadn't run into the Grub issue due to troubleshooting Manjaro at that time already.

Good vid.