- cross-posted to:
- linux@programming.dev
- cross-posted to:
- linux@programming.dev
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Interesting. As a former Manjaro user (several years ago now), my problems with the distro were more with their approach to package management and the AUR. They withhold packages for the main repositories, but the dependencies for AUR packages will always assume the latest packages, so I would constantly get into these dependency deadlocks where I could not install or could not update certain AUR packages because the necessary dependencies were the incorrect version. I view this as a fundamental technical problem with their approach, and was my main reason for switching away.
Hopefully the new structure/leadership will result in technical changes which fix their issues. Though if I am being honest, the vision of a Manjaro with rolling packages is basically just a reskinned EndeavourOS, so I am not sure what they would need to do for me to recommend this distro to anyone.
This was exactly the same for me. Every Manjaro install I had broke sooner or later because of these dependency issues. After my 3rd or 4th try, I decided to switch to EndeavorOS which is extremely stable for me and serves me well for a couple of years now.
I’ve used Manjaro and, over time, it’s left me without GRUB and without a graphical interface on several occasions – just as has happened with CachyOS, EndeavourOS, Arcolinux, and others. That’s why I no longer use Arch or Arch-based distributions. I admit that, in my opinion, Manjaro is the best Arch-based distribution, provided you don’t install anything from the AUR repository. The problem is that Pamac and some of Manjaro’s own tools don’t follow Arch’s dependency rules, so that mix of Manjaro’s own repositories and Arch’s original repositories can be a problem.
I just avoid the AUR on Manjaro whenever possible. It still works 99% of the time. The few things I actually need to be bleeding edge I will just try to build from source.
IMO they should have made this the official policy instead of adding optional support for the AUR in pamac.
At the end of the day, the AUR is just a pastebin full of pkgbuild files for people who know what they’re doing. And as a distro aimed more at the average Linux user, rawdogging the AUR probably just shouldn’t be part of the equation.
It optional, for power users. That the point.
Everything is always optional for power users on linux. What I’m saying is they shouldn’t have made a GUI checkbox that’s also easy enough for non power users to check.
So power users can’t use GUI?
Could they not have created an AUR mirror and delayed that to be in sync with the main repo’s? It would have solved the AUR ddos that the Arch team got mad about a few times and the out of sync dependencies.
The AUR just hosts pkgbuild files, no source or built packages. The pkgbuild can point to arbitrary external sources that could update separately. Manjaro could have their own AUR that hosts old pkgbuilds, but that wouldn’t be foolproof since the external sources could change. Also, if a pkgbuild was updated for security reasons, now Manjaro is putting users at risk by continuing to serve the old version, and now that’s another problem for them to solve.
Also, if a pkgbuild was updated for security reasons, now Manjaro is putting users at risk by continuing to serve the old version
Hold up, isn’t that last point just a criticism of delayed updates in general? By that logic, would Manjaro be putting users at security risk by holding back the main packages?
Considering they just hold back packages, but do not do additional testing to release them, yeah, they should not do that.
Arch already has testing repo, normal repo packages on arch are already stable enough
The difference is they test the core packages they release. That’s their selling point. Just downloading old pkgbuilds without vetting anything is called an attack vector.
The dependency issues seem like that are a flaw in the Arch design. It is the only package manager I’ve seen that requires running the latest available version of packages.
Why should that be a flaw on Arch’s side, when it ooses no issue on Arch’s side? Partial updates are explicitly not supported. That would be fine for Manjaro if they would not encourage the use or for some cases even enable the use of AUR by default.
Partial updates are explicitly not supported.
This is what I’m referring to. Pacman is the only package manager I’ve used with this limitation.
Yes but that is on Manjaro if they do not follow basic rules from their upstream and not on arch. If you ignore design desicions then thats on you.
True, but also why is that a rule from upstream?
Thats the only (sane without tons of work) way how you can have a rolling release distro without the need to compile everything yourself, everytime. Dependency issues will occure when glibc gets updated (or any other library) and you only update some programms but not all, its possible that those programms work or not.
Thank you. I hadn’t considered the binary dependencies in a rolling release.
I have a dream, that one day people will stop making arch derivatives that fragment the user space even more
Why should arch be any different - how many distros are there based on Debian (or Ubuntu, which is based on Debian)?
Are any commonly used desktop distros debian based besides Ubuntu ? Ubuntu derivatives are not as they follow the latest upstream packages 1:1 usually iirc. Monjaro has its own dependency update schedule so it creates a new userspace dependency set to build against. If 10 distros follow the same thing we have 10 different timestamps of arch you have to build against.
Maybe my info is out of date, I just use arch & fedora.
Lmde?
I think this just bases off Debian stable which makes it not too bad
Go install TempleOS
real
Welcome to Linux town, man. Debian’s been bloody flogged into a million distros, but it’s OK. Arch will be too.
Soon we will have forks of arch forks and each one will have a completely different set of dependencies depending on when the owners decide to freeze the package. Then someone will use it and wonder why theirs so many bugs
at least most of them do the healthy thing and just slap on a desktop theme and call it a day
thankfully so
Acknowledging the issues and having a plan is a first good sign of trust. Executing is the other, so we’ll see how this will going. I personally lost trust and interest into Manjaro and switched away. From personal experience, there were technical issues (caused by Manjaro), and social issues (didn’t like the administration and project leader). But I hope they “recover” and be better, and survive.
Good.
As a long time Manjaro user is good to see something happening.
As to why I’m a Manjaro user: I installed it on my laptop years ago and it served me well, with only a couple of hiccups (the now famous SSL certificate issue and some repo keys that were broken), nothing too difficult to overcome but that points out some major organizational problems.
Other than that, it just works wonderfully and I’m too lazy to hop.
Manjaro is the distro that made me ditch Windows completely. I even bought a Tuxedo Laptop with Manjaro preinstalled a few years ago, and I almost never had any problem (this laptop is still my main device, and I never reinstalled the OS). I love this distro, but if the financial situation is bad enough for them to fire the only full-time developer, it’s time to change things. If the community hard forks, I may follow. Or begin to distrohop.
I got a little bored with the anxiety of point version upgrades that standard distributions follow every 6 months or so.
Rolling distros like Manjaro work much smoother for my use case (web browsing, some gaming, light coding).
Isn’t Fedora kind of rolling but not really ?
Fedora is kind of rolling, but not really.
You’ll have frequently daily updates of 800mb but also have packages being updated months after developer release. It’s a good stable system with pretty modern software versions.
However, keep in mind that fedora has versions. As in Debian you’ll have to upgrade from one fedora version to the other, but I don’t think LTS is as wide as in Debian.
Maybe, I don’t know. I tend to stay on the .deb side of the fence.
just stop using manjaro and move on, seriously
I’ve been using Manjaro for years without issue.
It is the best distro for my needs.
What do you see as its advantage(s) over other Arch derivatives?
literally impossible, even if it was run by competent people (it isn’t) its design fundamentally caters to no-one
want easy arch? Cachyos, endeavoros
are those too hard? Fedora, aurora, bazzite
The current design of slowing down arch breaks more things than it solves and just results in a significantly harder to fix setup.
the only people who like manjaro haven’t tried anything else and haven’t really thought about their distros philosophies at all, or just got really unlucky with other distros. There’s literally no reason to use this distro that isn’t just that you’re already used to it. That’s not even factoring in that the distro is a net negative for the community (see: ddosing the aur)
Neither CachyOS nor EndeavourOS get out of the way same as Manjaro. CachyOS doesn’t even ship with app store by default, which is an immediate yuck for someone who needs a “just conveniently works out of the box” distro.
Manjaro is the only Arch derivative that allows you to never even think you have Arch under the hood. It has all sorts of QoL improvements and graphical settings for everything, it has a smooth and beautiful integration of all package sources (something Arch is notoriously bad with), and if you don’t need AUR, package delay prevents breaking changes, helping you not to think about managing your system.
Manjaro is not for everyone, and it will definitely not satisfy a typical Arch demographic, as it’s made with different people in mind. Hence such an opinionated take on your side. Recent management issues don’t help, either, but that’s exactly what they’re trying to take action against.
In any case, it was Manjaro that served as my gateway to Linux, and it couldn’t have been smoother. No other distro I played around made me feel confident in switching.
My recommendation for someone that needs an appstore with a gui is fedora, manjaro is terrible for this, because they have an appstore that regularly breaks and requires cli intervention anyway, if having a gui for package management is important to you manjaro is a terrible choice, as is arch in general.
read some of the comments here, this is not uncommon, and it’s a fundamental issue with the design of arch package management that has been completely resolved elsewhere.
No, I do not agree at all that that is a valid usecase for manjaro. Anybody who needs a distro that works out of the box and is convenient shouldn’t even be considering anything arch based.
Fedora is way more involved than Manjaro, and I wouldn’t recommend it to newbies.
First time I touched Fedora (that was 1,5 years into my Linux journey), I immediately borked it very hard when trying to install Nvidia drivers. For about a year that I used it since, it has shown itself as a generally stable, but involved distro that allows the user to shoot themselves in a foot and doesn’t shy away from turning folks to terminal. So, it’s decent for experienced users, but it’s certainly not for everyone, and especially not for newbies.
So, what do you propose for newbies? Ubuntu, with all its dumpster fire? Mint, that, for all its merits, stubbornly refuses modern frameworks? Debian, that will have a newbie drown in documentation? Manjaro isn’t perfect, and there are negatives to write about it as well, but it relies on Arch for good reasons that are often omitted. Arch is truly community-based, rolling release, highly supported, and very fast, which allows to bring all the recent niceties of Linux to any and all machines, no matter how close they are to the potato and how new the user is to the ecosystem.
you’re right, I oversimplified, bazzite is great because it’s unhindered by patents and preinstalls the drivers, I’d recommend a community fedora fork, the key being that it’s much easier to turn fedora into this than arch.
manjaro is this but with way more footguns, I say this having maintained a bunch of manjaro systems for people, switching them to bazzite fixed nearly all of my maintenance burden, because it’s easy to remove them from fedora but impossible with arch, intentionally, and by design.
If you want something easy that just works arch is very deliberately designed to not be that, on purpose, even.
Bazzite is good indeed, we can agree here. My main issue with it is exactly what makes it good for many - namely, immutability.
On the upside, it does indeed remove a lot of footguns. It’s much harder to actually bork your immutable install (although it is possible, I did once manage to cause seemingly irreversible damage to Aurora, which is another Fedora-based immutable).
On the downside, it takes different approaches to management and system administration compared to regular mutable distros. This makes troubleshooting more complicated, as a lot of general Linux solutions just won’t work. Also, some things still stubbornly refuse to work on an immutable distro. I recognize a lot of this is growing pains, but they are currently there.
Currently, I strike a good balance with OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. It is exceptionally stable for a rolling release distribution, it is mutable, and at the same time, it has extensive automatic snapshots and easy recovery. So, whatever you manage to break, you can roll it back. Still, I wouldn’t recommend it to newbies in my right mind, because, just like Fedora, it still expects the user to know what they’re doing, and is quite terminal-intensive. Maybe it could be forked into something newbie-friendly, and it would make a strong rival to Manjaro.
There’s one more aspect for me personally, though. Debian and Arch are the only two upstreams that are:
- Entirely community-driven (so suffer much less from corporate influence, and are better from the Linux “freedom” standpoint compared to Fedora, OpenSUSE, etc.)
- Widely adopted (have extensive communities supporting the repos, a large knowledge base and active forums)
- Not heavily opinionated (allow proprietary programs, work with systemd, etc.)
Debian has a very slow release schedule, and as I do appreciate more frequent updates, I’m pretty much squeezed into Arch territory. And in there, Manjaro comes with least technical expertise expected of the user, and with the most user-friendly approach. And if not for some weird issues I have with all Arch distros on my particular machine, I would consider running Manjaro to this day.
Oh, and on the impossibility of removing footguns from Arch: KDE actually works on immutable Arch, which must be very low-maintenance, so we’ll see how it goes.
the only people who like manjaro haven’t tried anything else and haven’t really thought about their distros philosophies at all, or just got really unlucky with other distros.
Look, I’ve used more different OSes than I can remember. I used everything from CP/M to Solaris. I’ve used Microsoft Xenix, HP-UX, OS/2, Haiku, BSDs, you name it. I’ve used Slackware, Knoppix, Tom’s RootBoot, Puppy Linux, Debian, RedHat Linux (not RHEL, the original), Corel Linux, Mandrake, Caldera.
I love weird OSes and their history. I think I have enough knowledge to jump ship when a distro is giving me a hard time. I use Debian on all servers, Xubuntu or Kubuntu (de-SNAPed, of course) on desktops. But my personal laptop is running Manjaro for years now because it works, stays fresh, and gets out of my way.
That’s normal most distros do that, what does manjaro do better than others? You have not made any sort of case for why manjaro is better.
you fall under “haven’t thought about distros philosophies”
you did not actually compare anything, what you discovered is that manjaro works… but so does everything else so that’s not a valid comparison, usless you can point to distros that don’t work and why
I have not made any case for Manjaro. I simply said it works well enough for me.
I also said that I know the story and have used many different OSes and Linux distros, so I know full well their underlying philosophies.
You seem to want to get me to defend Manjaro to have someone to argue with. Sorry, I don’t have enough investment in Manjaro to argue with you. I’m just too lazy to distro hop.
that’s not an argument to what I said in fact it’s basically exactly what I said, manjaro users only use manjaro because it’s what they’re already using, not because it’s better designed for any particular usecase.
“There’s literally no reason to use this distro that isn’t just that you’re already used to it.” Was exactly what I said.
You framed is as a non ideal philosophy. But acknowledging the things slowing down breaks and taking the time to make a calculated step so things don’t break anyway when updating can be appealing. I see it as a slightly faster stable. Inefficient maybe, but that’s just a difference in values. In practice it sounds like this hasn’t worked for some, guess I’ve been lucky. There maybe be other distros that do this better now, I couldn’t tell you, but from a, comparing philosophical differences point of view, Manjaro seems like an option.
If you want slightly faster stable then you probably want something like https://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Slowroll
which does exactly that but has a competent team backing it.
or even fedora, really.
I’m glad I’ve learned to ignore people like you.
But you kinda didn’t.
Tell me why I’m wrong.
But why? Just pick a new name and fork, if there’s something worth preserving in the distro contents. I don’t understand what the something is though.
But why? Just pick a new name and fork
They aren’t stupid to abandon the brand and community just like that and start from nothing. The team plans to start a nonprofit that will work alongside and not under the current Manjaro company. They do say that if Manjaro GmbH & Co. KG declines, or the feel that they are dragging their heels (which they have done) they will start a strike. They are doing this rn. If that fails then they will just move to the next stage which is to leave and/or fork the project.
Manjaro itself is basically a fork of Arch, I thought. I’m not sure what its attraction is supposed to be, but I’ll take your word for it. I similarly don’t understand the attraction of Ubuntu over Debian.
That said, we have seen successful forks like this lately. CoMaps is a good example.
I would say it’s the branding, Manjaro is a good name for a distro, and it’s known for making Arch stable… It was loved once for a reason
But why? Just pick another arch or arch-based distro like Cachy, Endeavour or even KDE OS.
Manjaro has been a slow sinking ship for too much time, anyone wasting their time with it is equally responsible.
This is just like that time they made a constitutional monarchy in France. I predict that the Manjaro owner will be too greedy like the King was and it will just end up in a republic (hard fork with name change).
Is today a bad day to install Manjaro then?
yeah it actually is. if you’re looking for an arch based distro I’d suggest endeavour
Well then, might as well.
I used Manjaro up until a couple of years ago. I don’t recommend it now. I switched to endeavor os. I hear cachy os is another popular arch based one these days.
I guess something needed to be done.
Man, it’s sad how effective peer pressure on the internet is.
It’s another reason why I don’t take most people on it seriously.
