First time user experience 1 perfect, 1 miserable

[linux-aarhus]

@davidkachel

A recent (2018) Mac is still my primary work machine

Apple branded hardware is created for macOS.

Running Manjaro on Apple branded hardware is unsupported.

BIOS updates and Macbooks

Some has success in using Linux on Apple branded hardware and some has not. That depends on the age of the system. Laptop/Apple - ArchWiki Apple branded hardware may present the most obscure issues when running anything but macOS - issues which may be hard solve. As one who have had bad experience with Linux on such hardware - my recommendation is - unless of course you are a tinkerer with a nag for solving problems or you can live with it - you should keep macOS as is. Quote Mac - ArchWik…

I have had bad result with an old Apple Mini (AFAIR it was 32-bit) and a macBook Pro 2017 (touch strip)

@davidkachel

I recently bought a new Raspberry Pi 4

Manjaro works fine on the Pi - be aware that several tools available in RaspberryPi OS is not available in Manjaro. Also remember that Pi is low cost single board computer - don’t expect a racehorse.

@davidkachel

Has Manjaro really made the decision to just not support older machines,

Yes - you could say that.

Besides the ARM devices - Manjaro only supports 64bit x86.

Upstream Arch dropped i686 late 2017 and Manjaro is based on Arch so it reflected.

There was a community inititive to keep i686 running and it was available for about a year or two and eventually shut down.