Nah, there’s no need to move it there, although I appreciate your concern.
Thank you, thank you.
As the author of that essay, I agree with you that it would not be a good idea to have it up there in the Download section of the Manjaro website — as you say, it was written specifically for the forum.
At the same time, I also do agree with @yoel that there should be a stronger emphasis on the fact that Manjaro isn’t for everyone, and that it is definitely not a suitable distribution for an absolute newcomer to GNU/Linux, and especially not if said absolute newcomer comes straight from the Microsoft ecosystem.
In terms of operating system design, GNU/Linux and Microsoft Windows couldn’t possibly be farther removed from one another.
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The former is an operating system that runs equally well on mainframes and supercomputers as it does on laptops and notebooks, or even devices smaller than that.
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The latter is an operating system that started out as merely a graphical user interface on top of a single-tasking, non-networked, single-user operating system — i.e. MS-DOS/PC-DOS — and that was then later enhanced by way of a DOS memory extender and a cooperative multitasking scheduler. And then later still, that whole lot was essentially ported over onto a more powerful but design-wise actually incompatible kernel called NT, with as their primary directive — from Bill Gates himself — that the end result was not allowed to break compatibility at the API level.
By consequence, someone habituated to the Microsoft way of, not just working with a computer, but also how they perceive a computer and how a computer should behave, will have a much harder time getting to know and understand GNU/Linux than someone who has never even seen a computer from up close in their entire life.
And that leads to trouble. Many if not most of the problems we see being reported here at the forum are a direct result of what I call “the Microsoft indoctrination”. As such, a heads-up in one way or another for people coming from the MS-Windows world without any prior experience at all with GNU/Linux — or with another UNIX, like FreeBSD/NetBSD and siblings — is warranted.
But in my personal opinion, this should then be carefully embedded into the description of the Manjaro distribution on the main manjaro.org web page, not via a link to my (technically more elaborate) essay here at the forum.
In the past, we’ve had text up there that wrongfully depicted Manjaro as an ideal distribution for absolute beginners and for gamers, neither of which is even remotely true.
Yes, Manjaro is more user-friendly than Arch proper, and yes, you can play games on Manjaro, and we even offer — via our hardware partners — a dedicated Manjaro gaming console.
However, as a general-purpose UNIX platform that you can download and install yourself, Manjaro is neither aimed at beginners nor at gamers, and if we’re going to keep insisting that it would be, then we’re also going to keep on being reminded of how it’s not true, both because of the increase in threads from people who have no idea what they’ve gotten themselves into, and because of feedback from people who will be more vocal about our perceived claims of Manjaro’s user-friendliness toward newbies.
The current introduction page at manjaro.org is already immensely better than what used to be there before, but in my personal opinion — shared by many among you, I’m sure — the technical and advanced nature of Manjaro as a distribution could still be emphasized more clearly.
Just my €0.02…