Opinion you said?.. https://manjarno.snorlax.sh/

Thankfully the Manjaro team didn’t seem to have a major mess-up recently, but they did have some very troubled past. Especially now that Arch has a real installer that bundles entire DEs for you, the premise of using an “Arch Linux but easy to use” OS seems less and less

To each their own though! Nothing wrong with using Manjaro at all if someone really likes it

Manjaro is what got me into Arch so I’ll always have a soft spot for it. I don’t keep up with internet drama so much but I do remember people saying some stuff about the devs being shady/shitty. But I’m not sure how much truth there is to that.

I heard that the maintainers let some important web certificates expire, which is a big no-no.

Never used it, but in my mind it will always be the distribution that told its users to roll the date on their machines back because they forgot to renew their website’s SSL certificate.

Twice.

I have an XFCE VM of Manjaro I regularly use and it’s a great distribution. I converted mine to unstable, which just means it pulls down Arch packages right away so closer to Endeavor OS or ArcoLinux (there is also stable and testing). They have some nice tools and very easy to change kernels. I think some people have had it break something and get butt hurt, but that’s part of bleeding edge Arch and being on a rolling release. Either watch the forum for issues, or be prepared to fix it, roll back… Some of us think life is too short to do a manual Arch install, so these Arch based distros that are easy to install are great, and add some extra value and tools on top of Arch.

I heard some security issues with it, can’t confirm.

I doesn’t deserve the hate it gets, it’s not that big of a project but it’s being treated like it pushed kids to kill themselves, the devs fucked up a few times and made some questionable decision (freeoffice…) but they put upe a nice working distro and aren’t completely insane like the gnome/ubuntu devs

I installed Manjaro sometime during 2018, and I have been using it without any major issues. The only issue I had is when AUR packages fail to update. I find that most of the time the issue will resolve itself eventually anyway. Overall, I feel that Manjaro is a nice and stable distro.

The only negative I can think of is the community. At the time, I was bluntly told to read the manual whenever I needed help or pointers. But, my negative experience was from a few years ago, so hopefully the community has improved today.

My daily driver distro today is Mint, which I think is more polished than Manjaro.

I ran Manjaro for a year or so. It works well and the default theming looks great but I don’t really see a point to the distro really. It’s basically just Arch from a couple weeks ago with no AUR support.

Manjaro was my intro to Linux, but now that I know more about it, I can’t recommend it in good conscience. Letting their SSL certs expire is something that happens (even though they could automate it), but telling their users to change their clocks so it works is a big no-no.

Worse than that is how they manage packages from upstream. Simply freezing them for two weeks is, in my opinion, the worst of both worlds. You don’t get timely security updates, but you still end up with the issues of being on the bleeding edge - just late. It also means that if you use the AUR (which is really one of the biggest perks of Arch-based systems), it’s possible that the necessary dependencies are out of date.

I think that if one wants “Arch with an installer” they should go with EndeavourOS, or try the archinstall script.