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?
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.
If you don’t want to spend the time to completely customize your system just don’t use an Arch based system. Seriously. Arch has some neat things about it, but it’s not the magical be all and end all of distros. If you don’t want to use what it’s good at use Mint, or Debian, or PopOS, or Ubuntu, or Fedora, or if you want something bleeding edge use OpenSuse Tumbleweed. You don’t have to use shitty imitation Arch if you don’t want to use Arch. You also don’t need experience with Manjaro to use Arch. I jumped straight into Arch after using Mint for years and it was fine. I still use Mint on my laptop and as a backup on my old drive I moved to my new computer just in case I do something stupid in Arch. Mint is great. I just like playing around with completely customizing my system. Why would you want something Arch based if you don’t care about the main thing it’s actually good at?
To answer your question: AUR. Aur is something that I love about Arch.
Also please stop gatekeeping. Installing Arch by hand instead of using something like EndevaourOS doesn’t mean anything. I used EndevaourOS after using arch simply because it was way faster and easier to configure. It still has all the functionality of arch (since essentially it is arch).
If you don’t want to spend the time to completely customize your system just don’t use an Arch based system
Thats the thing. You can still customize everything and anything. I mean what’s stopping you from using a tty and changing things? Also even the installer helps you customize a lot of things…
I’m not gatekeeping. Arch isn’t fucking magical. Do whatever you want. I just actually don’t get it. What’s the point? I don’t even use the AUR. It’s not that good. It’s an inconsistent mess of janky conflicting build scripts and trust me bro binaries, and you can get basically anything there in almost any distro nowadays. Hell, most of it’s on Flathub. You can also customize anything you want on any distro. Arch is just the easiest one to start from a very minimal system and build something up that’s totally yours. Why use a distro that only takes that away and adds nothing?
