Pretty much the title. Where’s the hate towards Manjaro coming from? I was pretty much a Ubuntu/Fedora user for years but never got too technical. Used almost always gnome, but recently got interested in tiling wm and have done some searches and stumbled upon the Manjaro Sway edition and everything works quite well, but I keep seeing people bashing on Manjaro and I don’t know exactly why. So if I were to use sway in Arch or Arco (way friendlier to install) if there any simple way to replicate the makeup sway default configuration?
Thank you all for your time.
There’s a lot of reasons people hate on Manjaro, though generally they boil down to instability - despite being on a slower schedule than Arch, a lot of people report worse breakage; their main “testing” is just being a week behind Arch without actually testing much.
Crucially, this can break things when mixing in AUR packages since those are shared w/ Arch and so anything in there that’s precompiled against the Arch version of relevant libraries might just break.
It also has considerably deficient security policies, such as the GUI installer
pamacallowing unsuspecting users to trivially install unvetted packages from the AUR without even a clear indication they may be dangerous, and they forgot to update their SSL certificatestwiceedit: five times (see https://lemmy.ml/comment/1343440), asking users to manually overwrite them as a “fix”.Unrelated to desktop, I’ve also noticed Manjaro staff are quite hostile and unpleasant to work with; I’m involved in a project that works on Linux on mobile devices, and Manjaro’s mobile team has been less than the most pleasant. This is a personal gripe for sure and unrelated to the distro itself, but if I’m going to take a dump on Manjaro I’ll do it all the way.
As for your other question; you can simply copy the sway config file from the Manjaro install. Either mount the ISO and search there, or if it needs to be installed to populate the sway config, just install in a VM and copy it from there. Necessary packages should be relatively easy to find by just reading the errors sway spits out and googling them.
I’ve had this site given as reason a few times though I myself feel it’s rather overblown and feels more like a personal vendetta for some reason:
For what it’s worth I’ve used Manjaro myself and rather liked it. Never had a problem.
On mobile Linux, Manjaro is the reason dont-ship.it exists. They distributed untested and WIP GitHub patches to their users, which understandably broke stuff. And users would then go to the project to report bugs.
I’ve used Manjaro for a while and my system broke twice in that time just by updating my system (And with “broke” I mean it didn’t boot anymore). Then I switched to EndeavourOS and I haven’t had that issue once. Been using that for over 2 years now.
First of all, the settings: you can boot up a Manjaro machine and copy the .config/sway/config and whatever other files it might be referencing (another config in /etc maybe?). Then it is just a matter of installing the dependencies like the referenced themes and tools(= any programs listed for shortcuts) in there and you should be able to get the same setup, unless Manajro people set GTK themes outside of sway or sth… Feel free to comment once you hit that wall :)
As to why Manjaro is widely criticized: they delay all updates by some time for a false sense of stability (I think two weeks) which is often considered to make no sense since it delays bugs, but also their fixes. Then there is some general philosophical disagreement between them and the Arch community since Manajro breaks Arch’s DIY and learning principles by being ready to use out of the box. This is mainly because they include all kinds of stuff which also makes the distro considered bloated. In the end, one big advice to give right from the start: searching for help in Arch forums as a Manjaro user is rarely tolerated, if you run Arco, your problem will likely be accepted though.
Hope it helps!
The config is also split up into usr/share directories, too, if I remember correctly. I installed Manjaro sway on my laptop to get and Arch-based OS with sway on it installed quickly. Then I tweaked it to my liking over a few months and wanted the same setup on my desktop.
It was a pain to transfer the config over to say the least, and then all the pixel perfect alignments I had done in waybar we’re broken on my desktop anyway.
OP is better off putting together a new sway config from scratch, using the Manjaro install for reference if possible. Maybe spin up a VM to have both at the same time easily?
Thanks both of you for the tip on where the configa might lie, and specially the suggestion to spin up a VM an try to get it right there, that’s a great tip that didn’t occured to me, I’ll try it!
I’ve never used Manjaro but the perception I get from it is that it is a noob friendly distro with good GUI and config (good) but then catastrophically fails when monkeying around with updates and the AUR. This is a pain for technical users and a back-to-Windows experience for the people it’s targeted towards. Overall, significantly worse than EndeavorOS or plain 'ol vanilla Arch Linux.
In short, there have been key signing issues multiple times in the past that. That were the most notable problems from the user side.
Running three instances with KDE that are unproblematic.
I used Manjaro for a while. Twice I had updates break stuff so thoroughly that I had to reinstall the OS entirely. The second time, I installed Pop OS instead and it’s been smooth sailing since.
This is my experience with Manjaro. Really good OS, with gaming that tends to work out of the box, nice choices in UI environment. It’s great right up until it breaks.
Now admittedly I’ve generally not used much Linux on desktop I have been using Linux on servers since the 1990s (the original redhat 5). But it took me a weekend to get the thing properly working again.
That’s my manjaro experience.
“It’s great right up until it breaks.” is a perfect summary
It’s a key issue and it’s the only one I have to deal with but man is it annoying.
The problem is I like everything else about the distro so much I keep putting up with it.
Main devs and is cluttered, there are better alternatives like EndeavourOS.
They let their SSL certificate expire so many times that it became a meme. If I remember correctly it has happened four times.
Just set a fucking reminder lol.
I used to use Manjaro when I first transitioned to Linux from Windows. I think it’s okay. Their mission makes sense, when you consider the grub-crashing that happened a few months ago, Manjaro wasn’t affected.
I thought Manjaro was great when I ran it (switched to Silverblue which works well for me).
The only annoying thing was taking forever to update plasma one time.
The only reason I heard of people hating Manjaro is because of the main developer … But for me is because it breaks more often than Arch
I wasn’t aware people hated Manjaro. I don’t really have a distro of Linux that I hate. I have some that I prefer over others for certain reasons but anything open source is a-okay with me in the larger scale of things.
I use Monjaro at work for my airgapped laptop, because it was the only modern distro that didn’t use Xfce and worked on the T40. I don’t hate it, but I also can’t ever see myself using it as my daily driver. If you do use it as your daily and like it, cool. If you don’t use it or you hate it, cool. For me, all the different distros is the point of Linux, as it allows everyone to tailor the experience to their liking, while still being (mostly) compatibility with each other.
I don’t necessarily hate Manjaro, but I do think people shouldn’t use it. Besides the things people have already said, Manjaro goes against the spirit of what Arch is supposed to be. Arch has everything you want and nothing you don’t. You set everything up for yourself so you know exactly how your system works and why X package is installed. You tailor the experience for yourself rather than having someone else tailor it for you. If you wanted that you could just use a distro meant for that in the first place like Fedora.
But even if you really, really, want preconfigured Arch you could just use EndeavourOS. It uses the normal Arch repos and has basically none of the issues Manjaro has in terms of security and stability. There is not really any good reason to use Manjaro over it.