How is Manjaro, is it easy to break? I will use Stable. I was in Mint before Solus, but wanted a rolling release so I went to Solus, I just do stuff online mainly, I just want simple/stable/secure.
Iâm not an experienced user, but I know that Manjaro has much more repositories/apps available in software manager. I think it would be right to say that Solus has much less software available on it.
For me, as Iâm making music, itâs very important.
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Hi @Edward78, and welcome!
We all do stuff online, and I spend 99% of my waking time in front of my computer and thus online.
Then you canât go wrong with Manjaro, IMHO. Bear in mind, though, that simple is not the same as âdonât require you to think.â Because, if thatâs what youâre looking for, I honestly donât think any distribution is for you.
Manjaro makes stable and secure simple, but still requires you to think. And as far as I understand it, thatâs why everybody sees Linux as hard. Because it requires you to, actually, think.
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Manjaro is pretty stable, best advice I can give is make regular backups and always read the announcements thread before you update. That way youâll be aware of any potential issues before an update and always be able to roll back to a working set up
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Currently Iâm using Solus OS, Manjaro and ArcoLinux with a SSD-switch-rack on the same AMD computer with AMD graphics. All 3 distributions use Budgie desktop, so I do not get any borders when switching. The file base for Steam is outsorced on a seperate HD and I did not encounter any issue to access it from Arch or Solus, what is my reason for using them together.
Canât state, which OS might be the best, as it tendends to be a very specific answer for every user himself.
My way led me from Arco to Manjaro and lately to Solus. Which is pretty simple also the upgrading path for stability in my personal view. In fact, it also limits you in what apps/programs to use, because Solus has the most restrictive repository of them 3. Fortunately, I did not recognise any issues with that, because all apps/programs I was using are either fully or third-party availible in Solus.
ArcoLinux stays closest to Arch and offers the largest repository source though. However, I encountered Manjaro to be at the start of an unique way. Not too far away to be called a fork yet, but it seems this might be the last consequence in the future. Most of the builds of the Arch repository do work, sometimes they need some attention to work correctly. Before I decided to change my desktop from Deepin to Budgie and also changed from AMDGPU to Mesa, Manjaro and Solus have not been on my list of most liked distributions due to my hardware recommendations.
Conclusion right now is, that Iâm using all of them 3, actually Manjaro as the most balanced in favor, while I could only see a small difference in upgrading stability (Arco->Manjaro->Solus) with enlarging repository the opposite way (Solus->Manjaro->Arco), but the differences between Manjaro and Arco arenât that big at all.
ChromeOS is for those who donât want to think. Please note: There are some Advantages of ChromeOS, namely for schools who purchase large numbers of these things, butâŚ
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Iâm an expert. I can break anything.
If you want simple/stable/secure and arenât bothered about keeping up to date with the new stuff, then why leave Mint?
Give it a go - if you want simple then get the Cinnamon edition and import your Mint dotfiles for a quick setup⌠otherwise go for a shiny KDE for something a bit swish.
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Absolutely agree. To maintain your system healthy, I can recommend reading this arch wiki page System maintenance - ArchWiki.
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I always start with distrowatch.org. I noticed Solus doesnât have XFCE. Package management is something called eopkg (Manjaro - pacman; Mint - deb).
There is a software comparison tool.
Iâd rather have to choose between Manjaro and Tumbleweed. And Iâm not sure if I would choose Manjaro now.
Frankly speaking, Iâd rather choose something non-rolling given that Iâve played with rolling distros for a quite large amount of time and I kinda tired of never-ending maintenance of such systems. What drives me nuts is a regular breakage of some drivers with nearly every kernel version especially when so-called âfixesâ are backported from fresh mainline to the previous stable releases. Sometimes it has really bizarre forms: a harmless nvme hwmon hasnât been backported to 5.4, but a breaking change to hdmi behaviour (which wasnât necessary in the first place) did slip from 5.11 to 5.10. Ridiculous.
Well I put Solus 4.2 on from the .iso, no idea what happened, but Solus started to just black screen and not boot. Did not change a thing before it started. No drivers installed also. Anyway I put the 4.2 ISO on & it is good again. I had Mint, but I donât really like how the updates stopped & you had to download the next .ISO to upgrade. I do miss YaST thought, that is a major reason to use SuSE. I just don;t want a easy sys to brake, Solus seems user friendly & rolling.
The biggest plus for Solus is, in my opinion their apps. They have probably the best set of visually coherent apps in the Linux world. And somehow it seemed to perform fastest on my laptop among the distros I tried.
However their biggest problem is limited app availability.
As far as user friendliness goes - IMHO except Slackware/ Gentoo/ Arch etc all are equally user friendlyâŚ
The apps is why I first thought of Manjaro, really Solus is fine besides that & really I donât do that much in Linux. I do like the .appimage thing though, just get 1 of them & that will do.
Solus is compared to Arch and Manjaro still a young distro, and being independent you shouldnât expect the same quality and quantity of documentation, nor the same amount of active users that can help you that quickly when something goes wrong. For that reason alone I would prefer Manjaro if I were new to Linux.
Yes - it is - in the hand of a novice - every tool has the possibility to cause havoc - just think kitchen tools or matches in the hand of child.
That doesnât imply a faulty tool - on contrary - it is the lack of knowledge and experience of the user which makes to tool fail.
Donât follow random tutorials found on youtube or blogs - they are often irrelevant or your system is slightly different - especially when it comes to graphics and network.
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I donât really install the GPU drivers on Linux, I game in Windows.
As far as a rolling release, I donât think youâll get a much more stable disto than manjaro. Of course anything can âbreakâ. Iâve broken Mint. You canât really go wrong with manjaro though.
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That is 200% true.
Not just because of more active users, I would say more users eager to help others in Manjaro forums. I have used Ubuntu forums (for work purpose, I personally donât like/ use Ubuntu), Fedora, OpenSUSE, Solus Forums.
And found out Manjaro forums head and shoulders above others when it comes to helping others.
As far as a rolling release, I donât think youâll get a much more stable disto than manjaro. Of course anything can âbreakâ. Iâve broken Mint. You canât really go wrong with manjaro though.
I guess we are too critical in Linux about âsystem getting broken in rolling releasesâ. MS breaks Windows every 6 months (at least) 
⌠But for some weird reason, we use other âtermsâ for proprietary OSes/ Software. And Linux community publishes patch to fix those âbrokenâ systems much sooner than MS or Apple.
Ya the Solus forum sucks, my usb stick was only 2 gigs so Manjaro didnât fit. So reinstalled Solus. I do wish Solus used ButterFS if this drive ever dies, I would like a snapshot to save & move over. Is there a net install? I mean I Solus is working again for me, but if I ever have to reinstall again because of something happening & becoming unbootable, No idea, I changed nothing, it just black screened at boot, had to reinstall.
I donât really agree.
For Manjaro, you still need to check update announcements in case a particular update has some issue you need to be aware of. See the recent grub and os-prober issues, and manual intervention for CUPS service links, etc.
In comparison, Solus and Void updates are pretty brainless, no need to check any update announcements. I installed Void from a 9-month-old iso then updated without checking any update notes. Updates installed fine. Not sure what will happen if you do that with Manjaro without checking update notes! Similarly for Solus: you can go long periods before updating, without causing issues.
Cons of Solus:
- limited repos
- the GUI package manager can only do one task at a time (e.g. you can only install 1 package at a time)
- I donât think their GUI package manager works very well with the third party (proprietary) packages listed therein. You end up having to update those using CLI commands which you can get from a wiki link on their site
- their kernels are found in /usr/lib64/kernel and not /boot for some reason. If youâre using it as your only distro on your system, thatâs not an issue.
But if youâre a dual- or multibooter like me and your PC is set up such that you have MBR/msdos partition table on your booting drive, but you wish to install Solus on a GPT 2nd drive, their installer canât figure that out and keeps giving you an error at the final install-bootloader stage. Since the rest of the install was done, I created custom grub entries in custom.cfg of my main booting distro. And I had to create symlinks from the kernel and headers in /usr/lib64/kernel to the main /boot of Solus. OS-prober and update-grub command from your grub-controlling distro wonât be able to detect the kernels in that unfamiliar location.
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