So I’ve been iso live testing Manjaro KDE Plasma lately and it looks very polished.
On the other hand, there is a negative vibe towards it.
Why the hate?
In short, the maintainers have made questionable decisions over the years, and the Arch Linux packages are held back by two weeks on Manjaro for… basically no reason.
If you want an out-of-the-box solution to Arch Linux, just use EndeavourOS.
So. I’m a happy Manjaro user. I don’t install a lot of things and have had AUR updates break stuff likely due to the 2 weeks delay Manjaro adds to their packages.
I’m still using it on multiple devices and I’m really happy. I considered moving to endeavour but I wasn’t sure how it would handle hardware updates. I mean, my understanding is that Manjaro is more “noob” friendly and I don’t consider myself an expert. I used the Manjaro hardware helper to fix my video drive several times and I like the simplicity of the command. Does endeavour require a more advanced user? Does it have the “easy to use” troubleshooting things that Manjaro has?
Ah. What about the Kernel uploader? I think the Manjaro one is unique to Manjaro right? Is there another one for regular arch/endeavour?
Endeavour has plenty of “beginner” tools, including a kernel manager (literally called A Kernel Manager) and a friendly GUI Welcome app that helps you update your system and your mirrors.
Most of the hate is because of the maintainers not maintaining their security certificates. Another similar distro is EndeavourOS, which I personally prefer. But either way, find what works for you.
Just out of curiosity I’ve looked for that a couple of months ago and I found that it’s relatively easy to transform a Manjaro installation to Arch and Endeavor. IIRC it was just adding new repo keys and changing the repos. People attempting that would have to look the guide up for details.
Yup, exactly that!
There’s not really any benefit of running Manjaro over Arch, it will only introduce problems over time. If you want a “pre-configured” Arch with a nice installer, go for EndeavourOS, it’s great!
I just wanna point out, people were using this exact same rhetoric when Antergos was a thing.
Antergos is no longer a thing. Just saying. Manjaro still is though! I believe it’s older than endeavor OS.
Even if Endeavour stopped development tomorrow, I could still use and update my system normally because it’s using the regular Arch repos.
It’s not all “purists” and “tribalism”, Manjaro actually has issues. Besides the well known certificate issues and older packages, I have the following anecdote which made me really dislike it.
A friend has Manjaro and one day his nvidia drivers stopped working after an update. I helped troubleshoot over the phone, while looking over the wiki. For nvidia drivers they have their own wrapper around pacman.
Turns out there’s a different nvidia driver for each kernel version. Already a stupid design. So unlike arch where there’s 1 kernel package (the latest the distro offers) and 1 matching nvidia driver, Manjaro has dozens…
The wiki never mentions how to install or update the drivers manually with pacman or anything like that. It pushes their own tool, a stupid wrapper around pacman, which is supposed to manage this for you.
In my friend’s case, the tool failed. It was trying to run pacman but there was a conflict issue. But the tool didn’t show the pacman output, so we couldn’t figure out what the tool is trying to do, and why it doesn’t work. We tried removing the tool and re-installing, and all kinds of messing around with it. It failed to install the drivers, it failed to remove the drivers, it kept failing whatever we tried.
Eventually we figured out the naming convention they used for the packages (again not mentioned in the wiki), and manage to install the correct kernel - driver pair manually, using pacman.
Tl;dr: poor design, bad documentation, and they push their own crappy tools which hinder instead of helping
there’s a different nvidia driver for each kernel version. Already a stupid design
That’s not a stupid design at all. A nvidia kernel module artifact is only compatible with exactly one kernel ABI. Thus you need one binary nvidia package for each kernel you ship.
Arch also has one package for every kernel ABI they ship:
nvidiaandnvidia-lts.
Though it should be noted that their design assumes that these two ABIs are the only possible ABIs which isn’t strictly the case as the zen, hardened or RT variants may sometimes lag behind their regular counterpart. That’s a stupid design if anything as it increases the friction of kernel ABI upgrades as a kernel package maintainer.We at NixOS also ship the nvidia module for each of our ~50 kernel variants; all major versions of the Nvidia module compatible with that kernel in fact.
The only possible way to access these nvidia kernel modules is via a certain kernel’slinuxPackagesattribute set that contains all packages that rely on a kernel ABI such as kernel modules or packages likeperf. That’s good design if you ask me but I’m obviously biased ;)I know you need a new nvidia driver every time the kernel updates, but why keep 50 kernel versions? My beef was them offering so many (outdated) versions instead of keeping the latest one which would make things very simple for users (imo).
These aren’t all versions per se but mostly variants, versions and versions of variants. For example, we have packaged the xanmod kernel which is a modified kernel optimised for desktop use but it has two variants: Main and LTS. We have packaged both.
Here are the names of all of our kernels currently to give you an idea (as a JSON list):
[ "linuxPackages", "linuxPackages-libre", "linuxPackages-rt", "linuxPackages-rt_latest", "linuxPackages_4_14", "linuxPackages_4_19", "linuxPackages_4_19_hardened", "linuxPackages_4_9", "linuxPackages_5_10", "linuxPackages_5_10_hardened", "linuxPackages_5_15", "linuxPackages_5_15_hardened", "linuxPackages_5_18", "linuxPackages_5_19", "linuxPackages_5_4", "linuxPackages_5_4_hardened", "linuxPackages_6_0", "linuxPackages_6_1", "linuxPackages_6_1_hardened", "linuxPackages_6_2", "linuxPackages_6_3", "linuxPackages_6_4", "linuxPackages_6_5", "linuxPackages_6_5_hardened", "linuxPackages_6_6", "linuxPackages_custom", "linuxPackages_custom_tinyconfig_kernel", "linuxPackages_hardened", "linuxPackages_latest", "linuxPackages_latest-libre", "linuxPackages_latest_hardened", "linuxPackages_latest_xen_dom0", "linuxPackages_latest_xen_dom0_hardened", "linuxPackages_lqx", "linuxPackages_rpi0", "linuxPackages_rpi02w", "linuxPackages_rpi1", "linuxPackages_rpi2", "linuxPackages_rpi3", "linuxPackages_rpi4", "linuxPackages_rt_5_10", "linuxPackages_rt_5_15", "linuxPackages_rt_5_4", "linuxPackages_rt_6_1", "linuxPackages_testing", "linuxPackages_testing_bcachefs", "linuxPackages_xanmod", "linuxPackages_xanmod_latest", "linuxPackages_xanmod_stable", "linuxPackages_xen_dom0", "linuxPackages_xen_dom0_hardened", "linuxPackages_zen" ](Note that some of these are aliases;
linuxPackages_latestis currentlylinuxPackages_6_6for example.)Each of these has the following
nvidiaPackages(modulo incompatibilities):[ "beta", "dc", "dc_520", "latest", "legacy_340", "legacy_390", "legacy_470", "production", "stable", "vulkan_beta" ](Again, some of these are aliases.)
This is useful to have because users might have hardware constraints. It’s not hard to imagine a scenario where a user might have a WiFi chip that only works with kernel ABIs < 5.4 and require the 470 nvidia driver for their old GPU. Packaging just the latest kernel and just the latest Nvidia driver would make this user unable to use their system.
Turns out there’s a different nvidia driver for each kernel version
That is literally every version of Linux out there. IDK what you think was different about Manjaro in that respect. Nvidia hates linux and it’s a tough thing to keep it running, especially on a rolling release. Use the DKMS driver if you’re going to update kernels a lot. At least manjaro seperates the kernel installs from the general updates to minimize this disruption.
I know that these packages are “linked”, and for every kernel update you need a new nvidia driver, I don’t understand though why they keep so many kernel versions in the repo (and their respective nvidia drivers ofc). Just makes things confusing, I assume people generally want the latest kernel the distro has to offer, or if they want something else it’s a different kernel “flavor” like lts, zen, rt, etc.
It’s not all “purists” and “tribalism”
I disagree.
I’ve had it break many times during update. Don’t get me wrong, I liked it at first, but if you want a system that works after update, you’re probably better checking elsewhere. Linux Mint, and Kubuntu are far better simplicity wise. Open Suse or Arch if you want rolling updates.
I am currently using Manjaro as my main Laptop OS.
Most of the hate is philosophical based in small often overlookable facts. And how Manjaro uses/is compatible with the AUR. There’s a whole github dedicated to the communities complaints here: https://github.com/arindas/manjarno
While I can see why many don’t like manjaro, I personally see these complaints as a way to evaluate the company to see if they improve.
My experience with Manjaro is about 1-2 years now. And the OS is very stable, honestly more stable than my brief time with Fedora.
But I did break a lot during that time including my DE. However as long as you are careful on where you install from, the distro will be stable.
Install order
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Official Repo - this is delayed by a few weeks to “validate stability”, one of the sticking points for the community
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Flatpak
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AUR - due to the delayed official packages some AUR packages won’t update immediately, or will cause conflict when they are.
AUR support is honestly the only valid issue with Manjaro. Due to the delay AUR packages will break as older dependencies aren’t being updated causing a large string of removals which can cause stability issued in Manjaro.
My recommendation is to avoid the AUR unless the package isn’t found elsewhere. Which is a problem if you installed Arch for AUR. Thus EndeavorOS is preferred.
But for my usage I prefer the graphical interfaces for all setting. With the exception of GRUB, there is a GUI for everything and you won’t need to touch a terminal.
With that said, you may want to look into OpenSUSE or Fedora/CentOS, and they are similar in terms of GUI settings. And are a little safer since OS level packages are behind another package manager.
But at the cost of less software. For me I’m stuck with Manjaro for now, and as soon as Slimbook battery is officially on Fedora trying that out again.
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I have almost a dozen installs of it in the wild for a few years now, with friends and relatives that aren’t very computer literate. It has been virtually maintenance free. This is on wildly disparate hardware as well, and it’s always installed nicely and with little messing around after to get things working.
People like to hate on it; it’s been by far the most reliable distro I’ve used, far better than "just works^TM " distros like Fedora and Ubuntu. I’d ignore the naysayers and use if it works for you.
I haven’t seen this mentioned yet, and there’s a good number of responses so maybe I’m up in the night, but it seems to me Manjaro’s philosophy is somewhat counterintuitive to Arch’s. Arch pointedly obfuscates system internals as little as is reasonable to “keep it simple” from a system perspective. Manjaro simplifies things for the user but creates additional obfuscation. I can see some people who value Arch’s approach being less than amenable to that.
But that’s not a reason to not use it. If Manjaro’s approach appeals to you, use it.
BTW, I don’t use Arch (at the moment)
I’ve been using Manjaro for about 7 years at this point. I’ve had issues maybe 5 times, and nothing I couldn’t fix.
It works for me, I have KDE version. I have AUR apps, SNAP (VSC works better in snap than flatpak), official repo apps. I have not had any errors in the 6 months I have been using it.
I haven’t personally used Manjaro but I’ve been daily driving EndeavourOS with KDE for a few months and it’s been rock solid.
Like Manjaro it’s also Arch based but still uses the vanilla Arch repos, Basically it’s just Arch for lazy people (like me).
Manjaro is the best.
The longer you spend in these internet communities, the more you’ll realize there’s a substantial amount of losers who can’t form their own opinions. They’ll just repeat whatever is popular in order to fit in.
Besides the points made - using their own repos. It kind of defeats an important point of using Arch, if you don’t use the official repos as your main source of packages imo.
It’s a rolling release. You have to let it roll. Arch already has testing repos, there is zero need to test outside of them.
there is zero need to test outside of them.
Then how do you explain Arch users have to deal with breakages Manjaro users do not because the Manjaro team doesn’t push updates as quickly?
Because they don’t push updates as quickly, which reduces the chances of something slipping through, be it their merit or not. This comes at the expense that it sometimes breaks dependencies and still has close to zero real benefits:
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You are better off simply using snapshots. Then you don’t depend on the testing of either party.
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Even if the Manjaro devs do to find bugs, they could have found them in Arch Testing as well, which benefits everyone.
I stand by my point that the update strategy is not a feature.
- I have snapshots included as well.
- Bugs found even in Testing and Stable can be prevented from entering Manjaro repos!
I stand by my point that the update strategy is a feature. You might not understand this, but my experience speaks for itself!
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