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?
From what I heard, Manjaro is very unpolished. The devs do weird stuff with the OS and their decisions are questionable if I’m not wrong. I think Manjaro isn’t as easy and stable as they advertised.
Regarding Endeavor OS, they say it is Manjaro done right.
Manjaro is very “polished” which is why many people that try it ( myself included ) love it and come to recommend it. Unfortunately, it is also low quality and poorly managed which is why many ex-users ( myself included ) would never use it again.
EndevourOS is Manjaro that works. It has no graphical package manager. You can install the one Manjaro uses easy but, sadly, it is unreliable and poor quality ( like Manjaro itself ).
What you hear is probably different from what it actually is like. There’s a lot of Manjaro hate from people who’ve never actually used it as their daily driver and are just parroting what other people online are saying.
I’ve used Manjaro for a year before eventually moving to Endeavour and then Arch. It’s perfectly fine.
I have a Pine phone convergence edition that came with Manjaro Plasma. I installed it on my PC so I could easily dev for it. Updates twice broke the phone complaining about a login screen lock. On my PC, 2 updates broke it as it wouldn’t start up the DE.
I have used Mint and Kububtu without issue but I don’t like Snaps. I now use OpenSuse as a simple rolling distro.
You may have used without issue, but that is not the experience of others. Devs have complained about them distributing non-master branch features that weren’t sufficiently tested or released and got their issue tracker flooded.
They are a really questionable distro quality wise. One of the worst IMHO, and considering they are aimed at new users, it’s absolutely cruel to use them.
You may love it and great for you, but people won’t give you free reign to advise a bad distro that is going to ruin Linux for newbies when there are better alternatives available.
On my PC, 2 updates broke it as it wouldn’t start up the DE.
Well, did you figure out what caused the issue? There’s many things besides the quality of a distro that could cause this, especially on an Arch or Arch derivative. Many Arch users have complained about their DE occasionally failing to boot up due to some random update that broke something for their specific config. Just saying that this doesn’t prove much. It could have been Manjaro, it could have easily also been a bad upstream update or even PEBKAC.
A few days ago, my standard Arch system upgraded to a version of pipewire-pulse that created duplicate audio devices on every audio profile change. I could have easily just said, “Arch is a shitty distro, they can’t even get audio devices working correctly”, but that would be misleading. Anecdotal statements like yours are too vague to prove a point about any distro.
Devs have complained about them distributing non-master branch features that weren’t sufficiently tested or released and got their issue tracker flooded.
This isn’t an issue specific to Manjaro. This also happens to any upstream project that are shipped by downstream. Many distros ship unofficial patches to upstream software, this is NOT new.
You may love it and great for you, but people won’t give you free reign to advise a bad distro
I don’t use it anymore as I am on regular Arch now, but during my time using Manjaro for about a year, I genuinely didn’t see much issue with it, at least no more than what I’ve been experiencing with Arch. I am just annoyed at how some people had one or two bad experiences and then are just jumping on the hate bandwagon with nothing much to back it up.
