So I’ve been iso live testing Manjaro KDE Plasma lately and it looks very polished.
On the other hand, there is a negative vibe towards it.
Why the hate?
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.
This. Manjaro isn’t trash, but there are better options. This coming from a guy who used manjaro and loved it for years.
So. I’m a happy Manjaro user. I don’t install a lot of things and have had AUR updates break stuff likely due to the 2 weeks delay Manjaro adds to their packages.
I’m still using it on multiple devices and I’m really happy. I considered moving to endeavour but I wasn’t sure how it would handle hardware updates. I mean, my understanding is that Manjaro is more “noob” friendly and I don’t consider myself an expert. I used the Manjaro hardware helper to fix my video drive several times and I like the simplicity of the command. Does endeavour require a more advanced user? Does it have the “easy to use” troubleshooting things that Manjaro has?
Ah. What about the Kernel uploader? I think the Manjaro one is unique to Manjaro right? Is there another one for regular arch/endeavour?
Endeavour has plenty of “beginner” tools, including a kernel manager (literally called A Kernel Manager) and a friendly GUI Welcome app that helps you update your system and your mirrors.
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
That sounds more unstable than plain Arch.
Holding back packages can do that. Not in sync with what the AUR has to offer is just asking for trouble.
Except it’s pure bull. I’ve been using it for years on the stable branch and I’ve never had anything break.
Anecdotal, but good for you.
- LeFantome ( @LeFantome@programming.dev ) 28•1 year ago
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.
Endeavour is basically Arch but with bling out of the box & an easier installer…
What bling¿? I thought endeavorOS was very minimalist as well. Just arch with an easier installer
Bling as in pre-installed themes…
I am not the most technically astute person, using Manjaro and the AUR for like five years and never had my system break. Yes, some package problems here and there, but where do you not have them ever? And so far nothing an internet search couldn’t fix. I found it very stable both in the XFCE and the KDE spin.
The AUR doesn’t assume arch packages, if the package your aur script wants isn’t in your repo then the package simply fails to update/install.
Edit: This is true even for Arch linux, as the Aur package might be out of date.
- LeFantome ( @LeFantome@programming.dev ) 3•1 year ago
There are many cases where Manjaro causes problems. For example, a package mag already be in Arch but not yet in Manjaro. Or perhaps the Manjaro package is not a high enough version number. If another Arch package requires this first package, in Arch it would grab the Arch package. The Arch package will be maintained over time. In Manajaro, the package is not there and so the AUR grabs it from the AUR as well. Perhaps it is even the Git version with an unclear version number. Over time, the AUR dependency breaks or becomes unmaintained. Even once Manjaro has the package, it may not migrate it because of the version numbers. Now things are broken. This exact thing happened to me on Manjaro where my GIMP ended up using GEGL from the AUR. My system was broken for months.
An even worse problem can happen when there are alternate dependencies. Sometimes in the AUR you will have multiple packages that fulfill a dependency. In Arch, you can see if one is from the actual repos and one is itself from the AUR. Again, if you choose the one in the repos, it will work and stay supports. In Manjaro, neither may be coming from the actual repos in which case it is easy to choose the wrong one. This sets you up to have package conflicts. In Manjaro, I would never know that the other option had now been added to the repos. More than once, I had the dependency that I had chosen break when the other would still have been fine.
Ok, this is getting long and that was just a couple of scenarios.
Suffice it to say, when I used Manjaro, I got the impression that the AUR broke all the time and that using the AUR broke my install from time to time. Now that I use Arch, I do not have those issues and I realize that it was Manjaro all along.
That’s not how source packages work. The only way they’d break is in case of major upstream changes. Which do happen, but the only inconvenience would be recompiling the package. Which you’re supposed to do anyway.
Do you reinstall your AUR packages after an update? If yes, you will never see them break on Manjaro or Arch. If you don’t, they will break on both Manjaro and Arch.
- LeFantome ( @LeFantome@programming.dev ) 1•11 months ago
I am not theorizing. And I am not taking about source code not compiling. I am talking about dependencies which includes the reports version numbers and version number expectations of packages maintained by different parties. Those broke all the time for me on Manjaro and it was often because of the differences between what was in the Arch repos vs the Manjaro repos.
When Manjaro fell behind at one point, I ended up with a version of GEGL ( labeled - git ) being pulled from the AUR. Later releases of GIMP refused to upgrade over that version of GEGL. I just lived with it for a few months hoping it would clear itself up but it never did. I basically had to back everything my out and install again. Not that it was hard but these kinds of annoyances happened for me all the time on Mnajaro and basically never on EbdeavourOS or Arch.
What made me move away from Manjaro to begin with were all the problems it had with the dotnet packages at the time. I blamed dotnet and the AUR and was amazed that the problems went away when I used EndeavourOS instead.
If what you describe were true it would make AUR packages fail (on any Arch distro) if the user failed to upgrade their system each time, every time an update came out. The two week delay practiced by Manjaro is a completely arbitrary period of timen in the grand scheme of things. There are users who only upgrade once a month or even more seldom and nothing like this happens to them.
the package is not there and so the AUR grabs it from the AUR as well. Perhaps it is even the Git version with an unclear version number
You will see that the aur package will use a git version and you will also be asked to remove the conflicting package when you are installing a git version.
And once again, this isn’t unique to manjaro, on my arch install yuzu broke because they were using dynarmic from the aur instead of using the one provided by yuzu itself.
Also gimp and gegl are already on both the arch and manjaro official repos, If you are using git packages and you don’t update them lots of things will break regardless if you are on any arch distro.
Now I wonder if pamac checks for updates of git packages by default, because your git packages will not be updated unless you explicitly tell yay to do so (yay --devel) I think paru every does it automatically with every update but then again most people will use yay instead.
Suffice it to say, when I used Manjaro, I got the impression that the AUR broke all the time and that using the AUR broke my install from time to time. Now that I use Arch, I do not have those issues and I realize that it was Manjaro all along.
My experience has been quite the opposite, a few months ago my install broke to the point that I could not update the system, turns out it was because of the arch migration and my system wasn’t incorporating the new pacman.conf.new.
The AUR doesn’t assume arch packages, if the package your aur script wants isn’t in your repo then the package simply fails to update/install.
Edit: This is true even for Arch linux, as the Aur package might be out of date.
The problem is not the package. It is the packages Version. If you have for example an application that depends on .net 7.0 and arch updates it to the latest 8.0 then the AUR usually gets updated soon as well. Now the AUR pqckage depends on the newer 8.0 Version while manjaro still has the 7.0 version. The programm now does no longer start on manjaro.
if your use the AUR with Manjaro, your system will break.
If your system breaks because of AUR it means you’re using AUR wrong… you’re not supposed to use AUR packages for critical system functions. It will break on Arch too if you do that.
I spent 3 days trying to get manjaro to work on my old macbook air 3, and still ran into a borked display sometimes after opening from sleep
I installed endeavour os (online failed, offline worked), and so far I haven’t had a single major issue with it
You mean manjarNO?
Yup, exactly that!
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!
Manjaro has graphical tools that make it super easy to manage packages, drivers and kernel versions.
I‘m pretty sure you can install a GUI for pacman on Arch/Endeavour.
You can but there isn’t a lot of choice, Octopi is pretty much the only other pacman GUI besides Pamac that’s sufficiently fleshed out. All the others are either just package searchers or CLI-only.
And Manjaro also has the Manjaro Settings Manager, which includes the kernel management module and the hardware drivers management module.
Manjaro for some reason can’t stop breaking crap, and when they do break crap, they aren’t exactly elegant about it
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
there’s a different nvidia driver for each kernel version. Already a stupid design
That’s not a stupid design at all. A nvidia kernel module artifact is only compatible with exactly one kernel ABI. Thus you need one binary nvidia package for each kernel you ship.
Arch also has one package for every kernel ABI they ship:
nvidiaandnvidia-lts.
Though it should be noted that their design assumes that these two ABIs are the only possible ABIs which isn’t strictly the case as the zen, hardened or RT variants may sometimes lag behind their regular counterpart. That’s a stupid design if anything as it increases the friction of kernel ABI upgrades as a kernel package maintainer.We at NixOS also ship the nvidia module for each of our ~50 kernel variants; all major versions of the Nvidia module compatible with that kernel in fact.
The only possible way to access these nvidia kernel modules is via a certain kernel’slinuxPackagesattribute set that contains all packages that rely on a kernel ABI such as kernel modules or packages likeperf. That’s good design if you ask me but I’m obviously biased ;)I know you need a new nvidia driver every time the kernel updates, but why keep 50 kernel versions? My beef was them offering so many (outdated) versions instead of keeping the latest one which would make things very simple for users (imo).
These aren’t all versions per se but mostly variants, versions and versions of variants. For example, we have packaged the xanmod kernel which is a modified kernel optimised for desktop use but it has two variants: Main and LTS. We have packaged both.
Here are the names of all of our kernels currently to give you an idea (as a JSON list):
[ "linuxPackages", "linuxPackages-libre", "linuxPackages-rt", "linuxPackages-rt_latest", "linuxPackages_4_14", "linuxPackages_4_19", "linuxPackages_4_19_hardened", "linuxPackages_4_9", "linuxPackages_5_10", "linuxPackages_5_10_hardened", "linuxPackages_5_15", "linuxPackages_5_15_hardened", "linuxPackages_5_18", "linuxPackages_5_19", "linuxPackages_5_4", "linuxPackages_5_4_hardened", "linuxPackages_6_0", "linuxPackages_6_1", "linuxPackages_6_1_hardened", "linuxPackages_6_2", "linuxPackages_6_3", "linuxPackages_6_4", "linuxPackages_6_5", "linuxPackages_6_5_hardened", "linuxPackages_6_6", "linuxPackages_custom", "linuxPackages_custom_tinyconfig_kernel", "linuxPackages_hardened", "linuxPackages_latest", "linuxPackages_latest-libre", "linuxPackages_latest_hardened", "linuxPackages_latest_xen_dom0", "linuxPackages_latest_xen_dom0_hardened", "linuxPackages_lqx", "linuxPackages_rpi0", "linuxPackages_rpi02w", "linuxPackages_rpi1", "linuxPackages_rpi2", "linuxPackages_rpi3", "linuxPackages_rpi4", "linuxPackages_rt_5_10", "linuxPackages_rt_5_15", "linuxPackages_rt_5_4", "linuxPackages_rt_6_1", "linuxPackages_testing", "linuxPackages_testing_bcachefs", "linuxPackages_xanmod", "linuxPackages_xanmod_latest", "linuxPackages_xanmod_stable", "linuxPackages_xen_dom0", "linuxPackages_xen_dom0_hardened", "linuxPackages_zen" ](Note that some of these are aliases;
linuxPackages_latestis currentlylinuxPackages_6_6for example.)Each of these has the following
nvidiaPackages(modulo incompatibilities):[ "beta", "dc", "dc_520", "latest", "legacy_340", "legacy_390", "legacy_470", "production", "stable", "vulkan_beta" ](Again, some of these are aliases.)
This is useful to have because users might have hardware constraints. It’s not hard to imagine a scenario where a user might have a WiFi chip that only works with kernel ABIs < 5.4 and require the 470 nvidia driver for their old GPU. Packaging just the latest kernel and just the latest Nvidia driver would make this user unable to use their system.
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.
Real reason for the hate: The Linux community is overly focused on tribalism and has a console-wars mindset where what I’m using is obviously the best and everything else must be flawed and terrible. Manjaro is probably fine for most use cases.
…although I’d still suggest just using base Arch instead. :)
- LeFantome ( @LeFantome@programming.dev ) 2•1 year ago
Linux is tribal for sure. But the Manjaro issues are real ( as a past user ).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
I’m an openSuse user for quite some time without any issues tbh. Just wanted to enter the Arch world and see if there is any significant difference.
Then literally just use Arch. I don’t understand why people want Arch but then install something different. If you don’t want to go through the install process then it’s honestly just not for you, but if you really want to try anyway give EndeavourOS a shot.
I’m on OpenSuse and it’s great. If you’re tempted by Arch, go straight up Arch. Manjaro doesn’t give any pluses here, only negatives.