Linux

In short, the maintainers have made questionable decisions over the years, and the Arch Linux packages are held back by two weeks on Manjaro for... basically no reason.

If you want an out-of-the-box solution to Arch Linux, just use EndeavourOS.

I used Manjaro for about 3 years

Its great but packages tend to break over time with it being a "stable" arch build

Over that 3 year period updates managed to break my install at least 30 times

Switched to Endeavour over a year ago and haven't had an update break my install yet

I used to be a huge Manjaro fan. There were many ways it let me down, some of which were just bad governance.

The biggest problem though is the AUR. Manjaro uses packages that are older than Arch. The AUR assumes the Arch packages. This, if your use the AUR with Manjaro, your system will break.

It is not a question of if Manjaro will break but when. Every ex-Manjaro user has the same story.

For me, EndeavourOS is everything that Manjaro should be.

https://manjarno.pages.dev/

There's not really any benefit of running Manjaro over Arch, it will only introduce problems over time. If you want a "pre-configured" Arch with a nice installer, go for EndeavourOS, it's great!

You mean manjarNO?

Most of the hate is because of the maintainers not maintaining their security certificates. Another similar distro is EndeavourOS, which I personally prefer. But either way, find what works for you.

Manjaro for some reason can't stop breaking crap, and when they do break crap, they aren't exactly elegant about it

Just give it a go. I used it for years, and had relatively little issues tbh. Most of them I think are hardware related as I'll have similar issues in other distros and even windows.

The devs have done some goofs yes. Things like letting certs expire, and as mentioned already, potential issues with aur. But, I remember having aur issues even with vanilla arch in the past.

Using fedora currently though, and I don't think I'll switch anytime soon.

My personal negative vibe toward Manjaro comes from my own experience with updates breaking things when I was running it

I'll keep it short and sweet.

I've been using Manjaro for about 6 years now.

When I had an Nvidia GPU, it would break after quite a few updates and need a rollback.

Then I moved to an AMD card, and I haven't had any issues at all.

Like...at all.

The End.

It's not all "purists" and "tribalism", Manjaro actually has issues. Besides the well known certificate issues and older packages, I have the following anecdote which made me really dislike it.

A friend has Manjaro and one day his nvidia drivers stopped working after an update. I helped troubleshoot over the phone, while looking over the wiki. For nvidia drivers they have their own wrapper around pacman.

Turns out there's a different nvidia driver for each kernel version. Already a stupid design. So unlike arch where there's 1 kernel package (the latest the distro offers) and 1 matching nvidia driver, Manjaro has dozens...

The wiki never mentions how to install or update the drivers manually with pacman or anything like that. It pushes their own tool, a stupid wrapper around pacman, which is supposed to manage this for you.

In my friend's case, the tool failed. It was trying to run pacman but there was a conflict issue. But the tool didn't show the pacman output, so we couldn't figure out what the tool is trying to do, and why it doesn't work. We tried removing the tool and re-installing, and all kinds of messing around with it. It failed to install the drivers, it failed to remove the drivers, it kept failing whatever we tried.

Eventually we figured out the naming convention they used for the packages (again not mentioned in the wiki), and manage to install the correct kernel - driver pair manually, using pacman.

Tl;dr: poor design, bad documentation, and they push their own crappy tools which hinder instead of helping

I have manjaro running on six machines. No problems that were not Just part of learning. Two of those computers were for testing different distros.... All ended up with Manjaro.

Hate is for people that don't create, or improve their own world.

I've had it break many times during update. Don't get me wrong, I liked it at first, but if you want a system that works after update, you're probably better checking elsewhere. Linux Mint, and Kubuntu are far better simplicity wise. Open Suse or Arch if you want rolling updates.

I am currently using Manjaro as my main Laptop OS.

Most of the hate is philosophical based in small often overlookable facts. And how Manjaro uses/is compatible with the AUR. There's a whole github dedicated to the communities complaints here: https://github.com/arindas/manjarno

While I can see why many don't like manjaro, I personally see these complaints as a way to evaluate the company to see if they improve.

My experience with Manjaro is about 1-2 years now. And the OS is very stable, honestly more stable than my brief time with Fedora.

But I did break a lot during that time including my DE. However as long as you are careful on where you install from, the distro will be stable.

Install order

1. Official Repo - this is delayed by a few weeks to "validate stability", one of the sticking points for the community

2. Flatpak

3. AUR - due to the delayed official packages some AUR packages won't update immediately, or will cause conflict when they are.

AUR support is honestly the only valid issue with Manjaro. Due to the delay AUR packages will break as older dependencies aren't being updated causing a large string of removals which can cause stability issued in Manjaro.

My recommendation is to avoid the AUR unless the package isn't found elsewhere. Which is a problem if you installed Arch for AUR. Thus EndeavorOS is preferred.

But for my usage I prefer the graphical interfaces for all setting. With the exception of GRUB, there is a GUI for everything and you won't need to touch a terminal.

With that said, you may want to look into OpenSUSE or Fedora/CentOS, and they are similar in terms of GUI settings. And are a little safer since OS level packages are behind another package manager.

But at the cost of less software. For me I'm stuck with Manjaro for now, and as soon as Slimbook battery is officially on Fedora trying that out again.

I have almost a dozen installs of it in the wild for a few years now, with friends and relatives that aren't very computer literate. It has been virtually maintenance free. This is on wildly disparate hardware as well, and it's always installed nicely and with little messing around after to get things working.

People like to hate on it; it's been by far the most reliable distro I've used, far better than "just works^TM " distros like Fedora and Ubuntu. I'd ignore the naysayers and use if it works for you.

I've been using Manjaro for about 7 years at this point. I've had issues maybe 5 times, and nothing I couldn't fix.

There will always be some haters. Haters are emotionally motivated to engage while most other ppl dgaf. So it's normal you'll see a bit more of them.

I haven't seen this mentioned yet, and there's a good number of responses so maybe I'm up in the night, but it seems to me Manjaro's philosophy is somewhat counterintuitive to Arch's. Arch pointedly obfuscates system internals as little as is reasonable to "keep it simple" from a system perspective. Manjaro simplifies things for the user but creates additional obfuscation. I can see some people who value Arch's approach being less than amenable to that.

But that's not a reason to not use it. If Manjaro's approach appeals to you, use it.

BTW, I don't use Arch (at the moment)

The real question is, why are you considering Manjaro in the first place? What does it do that a different distro, without all the hate (which I personally think are 100% justified), doesn't do? Why "risk" it?

Besides the points made - using their own repos. It kind of defeats an important point of using Arch, if you don't use the official repos as your main source of packages imo.

It's a rolling release. You have to let it roll. Arch already has testing repos, there is zero need to test outside of them.

Manjaro is the best.

The longer you spend in these internet communities, the more you'll realize there's a substantial amount of losers who can't form their own opinions. They'll just repeat whatever is popular in order to fit in.

I ran Manjaro happily for a while because I was scared of the Arch installation process. A couple of years ago, though, an update broke my system. By then, the archinstall script had come along so I tried installing Arch with that and I haven't looked back.

I haven't personally used Manjaro but I've been daily driving EndeavourOS with KDE for a few months and it's been rock solid.

Like Manjaro it's also Arch based but still uses the vanilla Arch repos, Basically it's just Arch for lazy people (like me).

I've had nothing but a great stable experience with it. I tried the other distros like endeavor and Garuda but they both looked ugly and had some issue after install. I think people hate manjaro because it's bloated but I appreciated that everything I needed was already setup, configured and good to go.

I didn't install any aur packages because those are unsupported and I don't know enough to support them myself.

Running Manjaro here. I'm been using Linux exclusively for years, and while I'm not a power user I like to think I'm conversant with it. I've had the odd problem here or there, but honestly not any more than I would expect with any other distro. I picked it because I wanted a rolling release distro that used KDE, and SuSE Tumbleweed didn't want to install that day!

It works for me, I have KDE version. I have AUR apps, SNAP (VSC works better in snap than flatpak), official repo apps. I have not had any errors in the 6 months I have been using it.

Used Manjaro in the past, worst distros i've used. Wifi card detections, Screen display and kernel issues,. Re-installed it many times. Never had thoses problems with Arch, Debian, & Ubuntu