Just came across this on another thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32494659 and it was news to me. I had heard quite a lot of good things about Manjaro and was getting ready to use it mostly because of the famous Manjaro Hardware Detection.
Figured it'd make sense to submit that article to let others know...
I have a theory that the only reason Manjaro is popular is that for the longest time, Arch did not have an installer. Do not underestimate the power of making things easier for your users.
> Do not underestimate the power of making things easier for your users.
I found this comment surprising. I believed this was one of those basic facts of life for over two or three decades now. I mean, look at the history of Linux distros. All of the dominant Linux distros of the time had a single trait: they made things easier for users. Mandrake Linux was the single most user-friendly Linux of its day, because installing was trivial and required little to no config to get up and running. Knoppix became hugely popular because users could just burn a CD and have a fully functional Linux distro up and running without installing anything. Ubuntu became hugely popular because it picked up Debian's solid infrastructure and gave it a user-friendly makeover.
In fact, is there any relevant Linux distro around whose killer feature was not making things easier for its target audience?
In the past there was a vocal minority of Linux users who advocated in favour of high barriers to entry and all-around user-unfriendliness, but let's not be mistaken: what they actually advocated for was ladder-pulling and gatekeeping.
The only time I ever tried it, everything was broken during the installation phase. I wonder if it's improved since. I seem to have the worst luck with Linux Distros.
This is definitely why I used manjaro for the longest time (and then switched to endeavouros rather than straight arch) arches installer was almost as bad as lxc's method for mapping uid/gid
I'm a bit concerned that Manjaro is getting a bit of hate recently, and that this might impact the morale of contributors.
I'm glad Linux has a diversity of distributions, and I trust that users are selecting distributions that provide value to them, and I'm thankful for the work that goes into the development of Manjaro.
Manjaro are also the distro that Pine64 apparently got into bed with instead of working with the broader community, which lead to this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32494659
More generally I think it's good advice to not install the fifth derivative of major distributions run by random people without the necessary backing or security personnel to take on the tremendous undertaking that is maintaining an operating system.
For one, it's not necessary. Most of these offshoot distributions do is install a desktop environment and put some theming on it, the package management is largely identical. Just install that stuff yourself, 99% of it is customization. Secondly don't install an OS from an organization you can't be sure is going to be around in 5 years, it's just asking for maintenance issues.
I don't use Manjaro anymore, but I really appreciated it as a user-friendly bridge I was able to use to cross the chasm from Ubuntu to Arch.
The i3 community Manjaro made me love tiling window managers. And Manjaro Architect was like a halfway point between the hand-holding installer and the minimal Arch installation experience. It helped me work out what I liked and get to the point where I could administer everything.
I wasn't aware of all the controversies. The only one that popped up on my radar was the treasurer thing. That's all too bad.
Fwiw, I've used a combination of Arch, endeavor, and manjaro over the course of ~15 years. I've been aware of the issues that the author listed for some time now, and tbh, I don't really care, I still use and enjoy manjaro for the convenience.
They're both really solid distros, IMO. I don't think you can go wrong with either. Manjaro is just slightly more beginner friendly with the superior app store, but for some reason still uses pulseaudio over pipewire, but can be easily remedied by installing manjaro-pipewire, and Endeavour is the near-vanilla Arch experience without the hassle of going through the manual install of Arch, which is especially helpful when you dual-boot with Windows. I distro hop between them occasionally because I love them both. If you don't like Manjaro holding back packages, just switch to the "unstable" branch.
Manjaro is the distribution I switched to from Windows, which was my daily driver for 20+ years. I've heard many people complaining about Manjaro updates breaking their system, but to be honest I've never had a problem. It's been a solid distro with a good UX. The Manjaro forum is generally helpful. Overall my switch from Windows has been easy.
However I am looking to switch to a different distro, mainly because I've felt a strange dynamic between the Manjaro leadership and users. I would rather spend my time in a community I feel better about.
I imagine that most people don't have similar concerns, which is why Manjaro attracts users.
I'm only asking because I have a domain that also uses a certificate from Let's Encrypt / R3 / ISRG Root X1 and I've never had to renew it. (It seems like they auto-renew every 90 days?)
arch itself had a similar reputation for half-assing security etc; package signing was a big sticking point back in the day
this is a plausible consequence of “whoa what if arch infra + polish/friendliness” turning out more popular than expected. you are no longer showing the world a proof of concept; you are now a vendor, like it or not. i'm sympathetic to the associated growing pains
that said, it reinforces my belief that past a certain point, derivative distributions are just kind of uninteresting. if you are at the level where distros primarily distinguish themselves by the out-of-the-box desktop, then fair enough. if you're down here with me in the ninth circle of hell where they primarily distinguish themselves by their package manager, the response to “ok no wait guys so like, it's debian..... but it boots into enlightenment” is just “ugh”
I struggled quite a bit with Arch. I found the documentation quite confusing and it seemed incomplete, and getting support was quite difficult. Manjaro provided a very easy way to try Arch. If the process to install Arch had been easier, I wouldn't have bothered even looking for any derivatives of it.
Purely in regards to the initial install of the OS. I wound up having to go outside the Arch install wiki to other sources to figure out what to do. It seemed written for someone who already had a pretty thorough understanding of setting up partitions and file systems.
Their initial installation and setup documentation was what I found difficult. Having very little experience setting up boot partitions and file systems at the time, the instructions were quite vague. I wound up having to go outside the Arch install wiki in order to figure out what to do.
I use manjaro as a daily driver. At the time I switched to the distro it was perhaps the only accessible Arch distro and was highly recommended.
There does seem to be some stability issues (particularly in the boot/suspend logic/login logic), meaning that there are times where the system freaks out and will enable (for example) RAID in the bios. This gives a very disturbing recovery process, as a live-disk doesn't immediately detect that RAID is enabled and no drives are found by the bios otherwise, but the grub firmware remains in the boot-up process.
I wouldn't recommend Arch for all users, and the switch between AUR managers, packages etc is definitely some deep topics for most.
Personally I think Arch, even Majaro, is better than the Canonical path.
Enterprises have different priorities from individual users who use Linux as a "daily driver". The last thing they would like to see is an upgrade disrupting their production, and many of them postpone upgrades unless required to. Enterprise Linux are expected to be predicable and companies like version numbers and golden images, and obviously a rolling release is not good at this. In short, Linux used by enterprises are treated as cattle that require minimum attention, but rolling release distros are like pets, which certainly are more delicate and fancy but at the same time require a lot more effort to care for.
There is no better or worse either way. Each distro has its own target audience. Arch is good as a personal work horse, but to charge money from enterprise users, LTS releases are needed.
Last time I installed it Manjaro’s value proposition was an easy path to getting Nvidia’s nonfree drivers working without hours of fussing about. Does some other distro fit that need?
Garuda's default theme is heavy though, but unlike MATE it supports scaling options between 100% and 200% which is critical for 4k screens. I wonder if it's easy to verify if Nvidia Optimus is working for my laptop's NVIDIA GeForce MX130.
Ubuntu has been packaging the binary Nvidia non free drivers for quite a few years now. There's an easy to use GUI app [1] to enable the non-free drivers, and switch between the different Nvidia driver versions.
[1] Software and Updates is the app's name I believe.
I gave Manjaro a try a few years back. It wasn't too bad, actually. But then an upgrade made it impossible to boot into the desktop, and there was no fix. So it was bye-bye Manjaro. Sounds like things have gone downhill with the distro. Too bad.
As someone who used Manjaro for ~4 years, Manjaro used to be a perfect system. I never borked my system in all those time. It had strong defaults and it taught me well that I am using Arch for the last 3ish years without issues. I will be grateful for that I guess.
While I don't know the technical side of things now, Manjaro was great as a product. It was far more stable than Ubuntu which was unstable and had older packages. Manjaro's community was awesome and they used to listen to the community as well. The forum was one of a kind. I learned a lot and made good online buds there.
Things started to change when they jumped into business and wanted to make money. They started becoming ignorant of requests and complaints from community. They also stopped doing the original way of things with respect to the distro. That is, they started violating the 2 weeks thing with packages. They sometimes for selective packages went directly to upstream devs ignoring the arch repos. KDE and Systemd are examples IIRC. This means the advantages of tested arch packages arriving to your system 2 weeks after was not there anymore. This borked a lot of systems and brought new issues issues as well. Their excuse was they wanted latest packages. But KDE was connected from a git repo if I remember it correctly. I am not sure if that was stable releases but from development branch of KDE (please verify this specific part, I might be wrong about this as I don't remember well. I don't want to be spreading fake news). Also, systemd. This meant directly going to upstream dev packaging without arch's testing or whatsoever. I remember increased borks after this started happening.
Then just like the blog post mentioned, Jonathon who was handling community and loved by the whole community was thrown out of the team because of the money problem. He was the glue between community and devs. He always tried to help the users. And once that happened, I started became very skeptical.
To make things worse, they had an issue with forums and it went offline. Instead of recovering from backup, they created a new forum where we all had to re-register. The old forum had all the conversations about the money issue which ended up with Jonathon being kicked out. And all the old users from beginning who have been there from the beginning. Their excuse was they wanted to start fresh. They did bring the old forum back in a different URL and put it in read only mode. But I always found it the most effective tactic to kill things slowly. Not bringing back the old one would be extremely criticized. They lost a huge chunk of old users who were frustrated for varied reasons then. They mostly left frustrated. And most new users wouldn't know or ever come across the old conversations. Most old users didn't join the new forum. And all the conversations was smartly hidden away this way. They can wash their hands off by saying - hey! It's available to read. We are not hiding anything. The worst was that they made the new forum bloody strict. This meant no more questioning the team. That was my tipping point. I installed arch and been happy. I saw Jonathon in Arch. Not sure whether he is working with Arch team.
They messed up a perfect system. They could just continue with the old way. Manjaro could've helped arch a lot. But they don't. They did revolutionise things like Manjaro Hardware Detection (MHWD) which automatically installs all your drivers including the graphics card in single click. You could install multiple kernel versions and switch between kernels. This was all nice at the time. But they borked it for some cash. Glad I moved on. Looks like they messed it up technically as well in the last 3+ years.
My finger wasn't very on the pulse of the Manjaro community, but my experience with the OS and with the (new) forum didn't seem diminished after the "companyfication".
I, too, have switched to Arch, 95% because I felt ready to (as someone else wrote, "Manjaro was my bridge to Arch across the chasm from Ubuntu") and wanted to try it, 5% because I'd rather trust a mysterious cabal of devs than a company with a bottom line that can get bought out or whatever.
I don't have trouble believing you though; they say $$$ is the root of all evil for a reason.
Can you elaborate a bit on what you mean? It's a bit difficult to install build artifacts directly into the system. There are problems like tracking version compatibility, installing resource files and tracking artifacts for removal etc. This is what packages and package managers do. If you wish to take that route, then Arch PKGBUILDs and Gentoo Ebuilds are reasonably easy. Ebuilds have a lot of similarity with ports. Debian's checkinstall is also somewhat successful in it. Nix and Guix also allow you to do this - but the approach is slightly different from the rest. However, all distributions need some metadata and procedure from the user/packager to achieve it.
Which never happens, even on Arch, where packages aren't held back for 2 weeks like on Manjaro.
Both Arch and Manjaro have been way more stable for me than Ubuntu ever was, and I've used them for like 4 years now. It's counterintuivie, but newer packages seem to work better than older packages. My pet theory for this is that the devs spend most of their attention with the newest versions of their packages. Submit a bug for a DE, and they might tell you to install the newest version to replicate it there (yet you're on Ubuntu...).
I like getting newer packages (which work better) and DEs (which crash less -- see KDE Neon) and faster hardware support.
I'll never go back to a point release distro like Ubuntu or Debian. (Although, apparently, Fedora keeps their packages as new as my Arch system does, the last time I checked, so maybe that'd be an exception. :p)
If your kernel gets updated, things that rely on kernel modules may not work properly until the system is rebooted. It's always good to delay kernel updates until you have the time to reboot.
What a vindictive article. The Manjaro team has made some mistakes, such as spamming an API and not renewing their SSL cert - so everyone should boycott them? If you're expecting ultimate professionalism and exemplary behavior from every open-source dev team, I have got news for you...
It's not just an "open-source dev team". They're maintaining a distribution. They've decided to manage their own packages in parallel to upstream and provide a user-script install helper they expect you to use.
Convenience-after, sure, but this whole distro is built around convenience-first and sometimes convenience-only. I mean we're also not talking about first offenses here. Ensuring you SSL key is valid is table stakes for an operating system hosting packages, but falling down four times? It's just obviously not a priority which is unsettling for a product that installs and maintains all your software.
If this was a group of devs building a digital egg timer, I'd agree with you, but this is your *operating system* we're talking about.
So how many mistakes can a distro make before we boycott them? The extreme version of that is we all pay for Red Hat Linux and refuse to use anything less "professional". So it's a tradeoff, and I think this article draws the line very unfairly.
That's up to the individual. I mean if you exclusively buy Jif peanut butter are you "boycotting" Skippy? For me, there are just better options with better track records and less drama -- like it's not even a contest. Taking a second look would require quite a rebound, honestly.
The only real benefit of Manjaro, as I see it, is a somewhat easier install path, but with the nascent archinstall script, that benefit is mostly gone anyway. If we're looking beyond the Arch-sphere, there's of course a healthy smattering of options with more on offer. You don't have to jump to Debian or Red Hat for quality and stewardship. Just because it's FOSS certainly doesn't mean there isn't real competition.
Figured it'd make sense to submit that article to let others know...