this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2023
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It sucks.
I've never used Manjaro, but I've used Arch (I don't currently use it) enough to know where it went wrong. Basically, they're trying to make a snapshot based distro out of a distro that's not snapshot based, and they run into issues because of it. On Arch, if you have an issue, you revert and wait a couple days. On Manjaro, if you have an issue, you revert and then wait, a week? Two? Is there any reasonable assumption that the next snapshot is good? I don't think they have the manpower to ensure snapshots are high quality, so they're merely whatever existed at the time, perhaps with obvious issues fixed.
I currently use OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, which is snapshot based by design, while also being a rolling release. The way OpenSUSE works is by having all snapshots go through openQA, which means all snapshots (near daily) go through an automated test suite. So if something breaks, they'll write a test and the next snapshot won't have that issue.
So my opinion is to go with something release based (e.g. Mint) or bleeding edge (e.g. Arch), but don't try to go somewhere in the middle unless you have a larger team. So either trust your user or your dev team, there shouldn't be a middle ground.
I've used Manjaro for ~2 years, then switched to Arch. Had fewer problems when updating Arch than Manjaro and installing stuff from AUR is working much better.
If you don't want to go through the Arch installation process (though it's quite easy now with archinstall), you may want to take a look at EndeavourOS. I haven't personally used it, but it has an easy installation like Manjaro and does not hold packages back
I used Arch for ~5 years on three different systems, so I'm pretty familiar with the installation process. My reason for leaving was two-fold:
I needed to switch from FreeBSD to Linux on my server because I wanted to run docker containers, so I decided to try something different. OpenSUSE was the only realistic option that offered a stable server distro and a solid rolling desktop distro, so I switched my server to Leap and a year or so later switched my desktop to Tumbleweed.
Tumbleweed solves the first issue as well by running BTRFS by default on root with snapper configured. I've done a few rollbacks in the 3-4 years I've used it, and it's way better than trying to fix an Arch system with pacman. I could get the same effect with Arch, but most users aren't going to consider BTRFS or ZFS on root with Arch (I had BTRFS on /home on Arch, but that didn't help much).
I think Arch is a fine distro and I certainly recommend using it to those it makes sense for. I also think EndeavorOS is a fine way to get into it, though I do recommend installing it once using the standard test based installer to mostly get familiar with the tools (I've had to chroot to fix Arch). However, it's not my first recommendation, and I instead recommend Mint to anyone asking. I love Tumbleweed, but I'm not going to recommend any rolling release distro to someone unfamiliar with Linux. Release based distros break very rarely, and if they do, it's usually at release upgrade where it's expected, so mitigation isn't as important.
Anyway, I think I'll stop rambling now. In short, don't use Manjaro, use either Arch or EndeavorOS if you want rolling, or a release based distro if you don't.
What about LVM snapshots? I assume everyone sets up LVM nowadays anyway.
I don't think I've heard of any distro doing that. Maybe it's more common in the server space, but LVM is usually only used for encryption and maybe RAID in the desktop space, and even RAID is pretty rare these days.
I personally have one large BTRFS partition for my desktop OS with sub volumes for a few mount points. I used to have /home on a separate partition, but I made / too small and needed to micromanage it, so I decided to just go with one partition on the next install.
I'm not familiar with how LVM snapshots work with BTRFS subvolumes, but I'm guessing it would just snapshot the whole partition. I use BTRFS for other reasons as well, so it just doesn't make much sense to me to do it differently, and why would I when Tumbleweed does it for me?
I do use LVM for encryption, but that's it.
I meant manually. I'm not aware of any GUI tools having support for the special LVM features either.
I'm not talking about GUI tools, I'm talking about package manager integration. On openSUSE, if I do a
zypper upgrade, it'll create a BTRFS snapshot so I don't need to think about it. It goes a step further and adds it to a few other commands too AFAIK, so there's a good chance that I'll have a recent snapshot for / if a configuration change broke something.If a popular distro automatically configures LVM snapshots, I'd expect more regular desktop users to be aware if it. AFAIK, none do, so it seems like something only server admins would know about.