Manjaro hate confuses me.

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I understand the past issues with the project but I have not heard of an issue in at least 3 or 4 years so I decided to try manjaro and its so nice. All I wanted was a rolling release system that has an updated KDE plasma but doesn’t move as fast as pure arch but isn’t Debian. Manjaro strikes all the right boxes for my needs and im mad I let the reputation from other influence me for so long.

How long has everyone been running there manjaro systems & what made you choose manjaro? Also share your desktops!!!

Moderator edit: Removed your screenshots

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I think this is what attracts most of us to Manjaro, i.e. the curated rolling-release model. :wink:

Most of the haters on Reddit and similar venues are merely regurgitating issues from a long time ago, and possibly reassigning new temporal coordinates to them to bring them closer to the present time. :grin:

I only started using Manjaro in April 2019, but I have been a dedicated and exclusive GNU/Linux user for over a quarter of a century already.

In addition to (again exclusively) running it on my own workstations and laptops, I also used to run an IRC network with a couple of friends, and all of our servers ran GNU/Linux, although we also had a FreeBSD server in our network for a short time. All servers were administered through ssh. :wink:

I was looking for a new distribution for my (then-)new computer, and Manjaro ticked all the right boxes…:

  • It is a curated rolling release.

  • It is based upon Arch, which means that the software is optimized for performance, and that it has a robust package manager, i.e. pacman.

  • It features a well-groomed Plasma desktop. Some distributions include Plasma among their desktop choices, but deliver only a plain-vanilla Plasma as it comes from KDE, with no customization or optimization.

  • Manjaro has a substantial repository — containing essentially everything you can also find in Arch proper — plus that if offers access to the AUR.

  • At the time, the repositories contained the very few software packages that I considered must-have for myself — I’m not sure anymore which ones they were, because that was over 6 years ago — but which were not always available in the repositories of other distributions. And that which was not available from the official repositories could be built from sources via the AUR. :wink:

After installing, I registered an account here on the forum — actually, this was still the previous iteration of the forum, which went kaput in August 2020 — in order to help out people seeking assistance, and I found a great and cohesive community here. So I stuck around, and now I’m one of the four Administrators. :stuck_out_tongue:

I’m afraid I had to remove the screenshots from your post, because this forum category isn’t really suited for that — nor is the Non-technical Questions category, where you had initially wanted to post this thread — but we do have room for that sort of thing in our Member Hub.

Unfortunately, as a new user you don’t have access to that yet, because new users start off with Trust Level 0 (TL0), and the Member Hub requires TL2 access.

However, if you stick around, read some threads, make some posts, give some likes, et al, you will quickly level up to TL1 and TL2, and then you can let your hair down in the Member Hub. :wink:

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The longer you stick around, then the more you might gain insights. There are many individuals - with the emphasis on that term… from odd corners of the world - not only Europe (which is also filled with many weird and wonderful types)… and they have strong opinions and can develop personal differences.

From that you can imagine someone ends up feuding, taking sides, starting arguments… and if they can’t win, they will leave and feel bitter… so they will spend many hours then hanging around in reddit feeding the hate and amplifying it. This is the poison.

Anyway - it’s good that you joined the forum, the FIRST place you should ask any question (after doing a cursory search first) and also get answers with varying degrees of accuracy; sometimes sparking interesting debates by which we often all learn something new, and also learn that something we already ‘know’ is completely misguided.

Anyway, for the record…

  • Plasma (Testing)
  • 72 packages installed from AUR
  • Stable now since installing 8 years ago

The most prominent ‘concern’ that people have are ‘stability issues’ due to Manjaro curating/delaying repositores whilst AUR is snapped to Arch.

The biggest problem this caused me is when I used ‘paru’ instead of ‘yay’ which is in the repos… and paru refused to build, because Manjaro has periods where (for example) Plasma is not judged ready for Testing or Stable and this period is not defined or specified.

Basically, it’s ready when it’s ready.

It isn’t perfect, but it sucks less than many other alternatives - if you used Linux before, you should enjoy this:

cd /usr/share/zsh

There you will find many fascinating relics of the Manjaro Team’s efforts - and the manjaro-zsh-config is a great reference which led me to manage to set up zsh without using bloatware like ‘oh-my-zsh’.

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Yeah, i noticed myself that kind of hate time ago, basically by people that didnt try the distro but decided to make an opinion about it. It’s kinda funny kinda not…
The thing is that in distrowatch Manjaro get ever good scores, and the system is enough solid, fast and easy for everyone.
Manjaro became kind of meme for many people, but Mint it is as well xD
Btw, some people says that AUR and arch pages were unreachable due to manjaro crew last days. LOL

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Yeah, the hate’s a bit weird for me too. There’s the one Manjaro going around “outside”, and another one “inside”, as I feel it. The outside one does sound kinda bad, but I’ve been really happy with the inside one. I gave Red Hat a go in the late 90’s and mid-2000’s. I did like the OS (always had a soft spot for CLI since I started with MS-DOS 3), but had absolutely no use for it, with mainly playing games.

I got back together with Linux in 2018, when I heard Valve had launched Steam Play. Also, Wine had become more robust. Ubuntu had a good rep, so I got that. I still mainly booted to Windows, but if a game worked on Linux, I played it there. I didn’t like the release model of Ubuntu so in 2020, having more time (for some reason), I started looking for rolling options. Basically it was either Manjaro or Arch. I passed on Arch since I didn’t have that much experience with Linux to feel comfortable with the idea. And that’s pretty much how I ended up here.

There’s been some drama, nothing that would’ve affected me, and I’ve been happy with the distro. It works, does what I need it to do, and I think only issues I’ve had have been either self-inflicted (so many lessons learned) or from 3rd party sources (mainly with the driver for my WiFi-antenna). I’ve solved almost everything through the forums. I still have dual boot with Win 10, just in case, but I haven’t booted to that side in 6 months, I think. Been thinking of just removing the partition since I have a notebook with Windows anyway and I’ve almost completely stopped playing online games (the few I do work just fine).

My 10-year old daughter is starting to need a computer of her own, just a light thing for school and some simple games (loves Contraption maker like I loved TIM as a kid :smile: ) so we’ve discussed OSes a bit and she wants to go first with “that Linux 'cause the penguin is cute”. I’ve told her she can always switch later if she feels like it. She’s been getting around just fine on my desktop. My 8-year old son will at that point demand one as well, but luckily I have a few older laptops hanging around.

During this year, I’ve been toying with Arch on one of the older laptops, and I’ve learned an incredible amount of things about computers and Linux. I’ve also made it to the point I can use it without hassle with all the settings and software set. It’s been a fun project, but I rather like the ease with Manjaro. I don’t have that much need for what Arch offers, but it’s nice to know I can work with it.

Oh, look. It’s an infodump again. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

I think the Arch-connection might be one cause. Arch users feel it’s encroaching on their turf and identity, and fans of other distros play off from that and the boosted bad rep and possibly the idea that Manjaro is trying to be something special deriving from Arch.

Arch seems to be on a weird pedestal.

(edit: "no consecutive replies allowed)

Mod note:- You can easily edit the existing post. If it is to respond to another person, just quote a part of their post and continue on from there. Cheers.

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When Linux Mint stopped officially kde support in 2018 i looked for another distro.

I never thought going to a rolling release before, but as this time with all distro i tried, only Manjaro worked out of the box with my NVidia card using Bumblebee.

Then i realized it was one of the best option within distributions (for me), for 7 years now.

My desktop is sooo lame, usually Breath with some system sensors plasmoids in the panel :yum:
Most of my tweaks are under the hood.

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Lucky enough, I choose Manjaro from day one of hopping between Linux distros, for the similar reasons you mentioned.

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:point_up:You obviously have the wrong mindset to enjoy all the drama… Some of us are more interested just to boot up and get stuff done.

For most of us, it was minor drama - but remember only a tiny proportion of Manjaro users use the forum - and I’d expect that to be fairly true of reddit too…

Also, when you start scrutinising other distributions, they all have more than their fair share of drama.

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Hello, a marsupial greeting.

I’ve already mentioned this before: people will hate something simply because someone else does it, without any real justification or reason. They just want to be integrated into something because they’ve never felt accepted in any way.

Manjaro has long offered a strong and respectful community, a distro as strong as Debian but as rotating as Arch. No distro is perfect or bug-free; in fact, no system is. Those who are up to date and experienced with Linux know that complaining and “crying” doesn’t help at all; what helps is being part of it, informing and learning. That’s true free software. We’re not simply as if we’ve paid, and we have the right, as “customers,” to complain about the product.

Manjaro isn’t a product; it’s a team with a community. So let those crying on Reddit and Twitter keep crying. I assure you, none of them ever used Manjaro for more than a month. And at the first problem that they themselves most likely caused, they jumped to another one, and they continue like this until they finally go to Windows and say “Linux doesn’t work.”

:kangaroo:

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Some people never outgrow junior high. Haters gotta hate. That’s all.

Back when I grew up, it was Chevy vs. Ford vs. Mopar. These days it’s OSs, or Radeon vs. Nvidia.

Big whoop.

I used Unix, and later, Linux on and off through the 80s and 90s. In the 00s ran my servers on CentOS and desktops on Ubuntu. (Had a Windows box in there too, only because I needed to run Dreamweaver.) Sold my hosting service in 08 and just stuck with Ubuntu out of habit, and that real life forced any issues I had with it into the background.

Primarily it was that their main feature, “stability”, translates in my head to “calcified”, “old-fashioned” and “out of date”. These are things that corporate IT values in order to reduce support costs. I get it, but I’m not in that demographic.

If I wanted stability, I’d still be using WordStar on CP/M instead of LibreOffice on Linux. (I keep the appimage, WordTsar, around for occasional trips down memory lane.)

When rolling releases finally came to my attention, they solved all the issues I’d had with other distros. Arch seemed like the one, but I wanted a Calamity, erm, Calamari, no, Calamares installer. And a forum community with a decent vibe. So Manjaro got the nod. Been here just around a year now.

KDE Plasma and Testing Branch are the best fit for me. And while my usage is pretty vanilla—browsers, LibreOffice, Audacious and Audacity mainly—I like that the versions keep up. Which was the driving factor in choosing rolling.

Packages: 1439 pm: pacman pkgs: 1426 libs: 310 tools: pamac,paru pm: flatpak pkgs: 13

Sorry, Ben. I’ve never had an issue with the combination of testing branch and paru. And for all the complaints about it, I’ve also never had a problem with pamac-gui. Possibly all due to plain vanilla.

After learning of archinstall, I keep an installation on a laptop (core-testing, extra-testing and KDE-Unstable) to keep an eye on what’s coming. I also recently purchased a secondhand laptop that I’ve put CachyOS on.

My desktop and primary laptop remain Manjaro, and for all the experimenting, are likely to stay that way. Although I’ve found little things in the others that I like and have incorporated into my Manjaro installations.

Now if only I could figure out how sddm in CachyOS respects that I mouse left-handed and the others don’t…

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absolutely!

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I… miss your point. :open_mouth: That’s what I’m expressing there. If it does not affect me, why would I be interested in it? I find drama exasperating. It’s one of the main things why I don’t take part in communities in general.

Or did I misunderstand your point?

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Every self-respecting person knows the pinnacle of performance is a Chevy with a Radeon powered Infotainment system. :smiley:

But seriously, @brucew is completely correct. I run the Unstable branch because I like to live on the edge. If you want perfect and/or stable there is no such thing, but Stable Manjaro is pretty close.

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Haha it’s kind of a joke, implying that we’re the odd ones out because we don’t care about things that don’t affect us.

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Oh!

Heh. Yeah, this is why I always ask for explanation in online conversations if something feels off, instead of immediately assuming malice. :wink:

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I see this phrase a lot. Perhaps you can define it?

I switched to unstable within days of installing Manjaro. 1.5 years, and didn’t have one issue.

Currently running Arch/testing. No issues for over 3 years now.

It takes a couple of minutes to look at what’s going to be updated, and to determine what might be a problem, before upgrading.

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I chose Manjaro for the same reasons: I wanted/needed to use updated software without having to spend too much time maintaining my OS.
My first distro was Gentoo, then I enjoyed the peace of (K)Ubuntu and Mint KDE. When they stopped making Mint KDE I gave a quick try to Neon, then I settled with Manjaro KDE since about 2016. My current install has been running since 2020.

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Generally speaking it means: To take risks.
Specfically speaking it means: To make the conscious choice to trade the curated reliability of the default Stable branch for immediate access to the very latest software packages, essentially volunteering as a first-line tester for the entire Manjaro ecosystem.

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Yeah, that’s the thing… I use Manjaro everyday and i dont see anything wrong with this distro. Are there better distros out there? Probably, i dont know, but this one is good for people that want something “easy” (well, more or less), stable and all that. It is not a fckn pain, it doesnt crash, so dont see the point why manjaro is the “clown” of linux and everyone make fun of it… anyways.

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A popular techno trope, I suppose.

My take: If someone really wants to live on the cutting edge of technology, in terms of Arch based distributions, they should simply be using Arch.

…BTW :smiling_imp:

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