Pretty much the title. Where’s the hate towards Manjaro coming from? I was pretty much a Ubuntu/Fedora user for years but never got too technical. Used almost always gnome, but recently got interested in tiling wm and have done some searches and stumbled upon the Manjaro Sway edition and everything works quite well, but I keep seeing people bashing on Manjaro and I don’t know exactly why. So if I were to use sway in Arch or Arco (way friendlier to install) if there any simple way to replicate the makeup sway default configuration?
Thank you all for your time.
There’s a lot of reasons people hate on Manjaro, though generally they boil down to instability - despite being on a slower schedule than Arch, a lot of people report worse breakage; their main “testing” is just being a week behind Arch without actually testing much.
Crucially, this can break things when mixing in AUR packages since those are shared w/ Arch and so anything in there that’s precompiled against the Arch version of relevant libraries might just break.
It also has considerably deficient security policies, such as the GUI installer pamac allowing unsuspecting users to trivially install unvetted packages from the AUR without even a clear indication they may be dangerous, and they forgot to update their SSL certificates twice edit: five times (see https://lemmy.ml/comment/1343440), asking users to manually overwrite them as a “fix”.
Unrelated to desktop, I’ve also noticed Manjaro staff are quite hostile and unpleasant to work with; I’m involved in a project that works on Linux on mobile devices, and Manjaro’s mobile team has been less than the most pleasant. This is a personal gripe for sure and unrelated to the distro itself, but if I’m going to take a dump on Manjaro I’ll do it all the way.
As for your other question; you can simply copy the sway config file from the Manjaro install. Either mount the ISO and search there, or if it needs to be installed to populate the sway config, just install in a VM and copy it from there. Necessary packages should be relatively easy to find by just reading the errors sway spits out and googling them.
such as the GUI installer pamac allowing unsuspecting users to trivially install unvetted packages from the AUR without even a clear indication they may be dangerous
Unless something has changed since the last time I used Manjaro, this isn’t actually true. You have to go relatively deep into Pamac’s settings menu to enable AUR packages, and when you do, a popup comes up telling you what the AUR is and why it might be dangerous (although iirc, it neglects to tell you that an extra reason is Manjaro packages being out of date).
Not that I’m pro-Manjaro, for all the other reasons you’ve given.
Good point and I absolutely should have mentioned this in my original comment, but I do think there is a risk here worth mentioning. A lot of guides for installing some arbitrary piece of software on Manjaro (or, to be fair, any Arch-based distro) will boil down to installing some package from the AUR, and the average Manjaro user is probably less tech-savvy than the average Arch user. Also, the pamac warning dialog only warns against packages not compiling or being buggy, not against malicious ones, and as far as I know - though it’s been a while since I used pamac - it doesn’t allow you to inspect the PKGBUILD at install-time, whereas most CLI AUR helpers e.g. paru which I use require it and require manual signoff every time said build script changes.
As an entirely unscientific test, I googled “manjaro enable aur” and checked the first 5 results to see if there’s any warnings (I figured this is a relatively common query from Manjaro users?) and only 2 even mentioned the risk of malicious packages, with the top result not mentioning any risks whatsoever, not even breakage or bugginess. I’m sure there are many resources that do make this clear, but I doubt the average Manjaro user will see them.
This is arguably an issue on most Arch-based distros with a pretty installer, though it seems Manjaro is particularly vulnerable since it’s marketed as a beginner-friendly distro despite all of these footguns.
Edit: at the risk of crucifixion, this is also why I usually direct newcomers towards using flatpaks wherever possible instead of using 3rd party repositories unless said repositories come directly from the developers of said (trusted) package. Briefly looking over the Manjaro docs, it seems like enabling flatpaks is actually harder than enabling AUR packages as it requires installing a compat plugin (whereas AUR support appears to just be a settings change). Maybe there’s an option during the installer to enable it, but I couldn’t find a mention, and this might also push users towards the less-secure and unsandboxed AUR.
This…all of it. I started with Arch using Manjaro, like so many do. There was a mass exodus that exploded, and the worst lot remained on the dev team. Beyond that, as you stated, they convice their users that holding back packages is for their benefit, when in reality, your system becomes unstable at times as a result, especially becoming out of sync with AUR. It is still one of the most popular Arch distros, and …well…I feel sorry for their uninformed users who believe it is a stable choice.
For information sake; Reasons Against Using Manjaro
I used Arch in the past but don’t have much time to tinker with my Linux installs anymore, so I switched to Manjaro on most of my devices, hoping to get a balance between low maintenance and access to bleeding edge and AUR ecosystem. I do notice the issues with updates getting delayed more and more in the past few months, and issues with AUR packages getting out of sync like you mentioned.
I wonder if I should start looking into something else. Any recommendation?
Yes, stick with Arch. Arch is not the issue if installed without the holding chambers Manjaro puts in place. Arch has a good installer on its own, but if you need a bit more, distros like EndeavourOS, Calam-Arch-Installer, ALCI (Arch Linux Calamares Installer,) and even Garuda are all fine options.
On mobile Linux, Manjaro is the reason dont-ship.it exists. They distributed untested and WIP GitHub patches to their users, which understandably broke stuff. And users would then go to the project to report bugs.
There are multiple types of people “hating” Manjaro to various degrees.
There are the “It GoEs AgAinsT ThE ArCh PhiLoSopHy” guys - those you should ignore without a second thought. Because duh, that’s why it’s its own distro and not Arch. They probably also hate Endeavor, Garuda and all the other great Arch based distros and have no idea what they are talking about.
There are the ones who, like myself, tried Manjaro briefly, realized there was something broken right out of the box, thought “lol stable my ass” and then invested way too much time in Arch on another distro. You should ignore us as well.
There are the ones who at least claim to have proberly used Manjaro for a while and say there is no noticeable benefit, if not disadvantages. They might have a point (shout out the the guy or gal who mentioned their frequent certificate fails lmao).
And finally there are those who have decided Manjaro just isn’t for them and moved on. They can probably give an actually balanced and fair review of Manjaro.
But then again, there are also people maintaining and liking the project, so there seems to be at the very least some perceived value to it. Maybe it’s worth it, maybe it isn’t. Frankly, I don’t care whether people this distro. And why should I?
I also don’t get why a couple dozen DEs exist, when I hate everything but Plasma and Cinnamon, maybe GNOME. But if people want to use them and go as far as to maintain them, there is probably a reason and I have better things to do than stop them.
@UnfortunateShort @jackofalltrades I’m a noob Linux user and I have used Manjaro in the past for about 3 months, i liked it very much. I think people should try it out.
But what did you like about Manjaro compared to other distributions? If I introduce someone who’s never used the internet before to Internet Explorer 6, they might claim to like it very much as well.
@BaconIsAVeg I agree with your statement. I liked Manjaro because it felt a little bit more faster on my potato PC and it that it looked nice (i know you can customize every distro to your liking, but I’m the kind of person that just uses the defaults). Before i used Fedora, Ubuntu 18.04 and Linux mint.
For a few years now i am using openSUSE for my daily tasks and windows for some light gaming (i still have the same potato PC, but upgraded with SSD)
I’ve had this site given as reason a few times though I myself feel it’s rather overblown and feels more like a personal vendetta for some reason:
For what it’s worth I’ve used Manjaro myself and rather liked it. Never had a problem.
These are the reasons people hate Manjaro: https://manjarno.snorlax.sh/
Yup, it’s dead. Here’s the Internet Archive’s snapshot: https://web.archive.org/web/20230626075444/https://manjarno.snorlax.sh/
I don’t think Manjaro made Asahi, that seems like poor phrasing. Manjaro has tried to get into the ARM scene for sure (and royally messed up), but Asahi is a completely independent project, directly based on Arch ARM.
