After experiencing and getting familiar with Manjaro and Plasma on Stable as a new user to Linux, I think I’m ready to switch to the Testing Branch of Manjaro, and possibly contributing back to the project itself or other 3rd party utilities by reporting bugs…
Also not waiting months for new updates is something I’ve considered too.
I wanted to create this post to just know some tips and possible caveats I should consider before I switch…
I know switching back is a little rough, but I dont think I will be doing that.
My Appreciation to Manjaro Team :
First of all thanks for making me ‘Member’ on the forum.
I have had extremely Stable experience on Manjaro and KDE, not once the system broke (I switched to Linux in Oct 2025) while there were some minor issues I was quickly able to address them. Seems like I hit the ‘Perfect Distro and DE’ for me on first try.
Manjaro KDE is and will be my first recommendation of Distro+DE for my friends, and hopefully the Management stuff is sorted very soon. I’m in 100% favour of new non profit e.V, hopefully they fix whatever reputation damage has been done to the Distro, regardless they have kept our system very stable is well done job.
This would help recommending the distro even easier for sure.
Hehe, we didn’t do that — Discourse does that, depending on your activity.
You are a TL2 now — i.e. “Member” — and you now also have access to the Member Hub.
Well, I personally keep their degree of n00bness into account. If they’re of the Eternal N00b™ variety, then I will generally recommend something more attuned to their level of (in)competence.
We are confident that we will be able to sort things out in a way that will benefit all parties involved.
As for Manjaro’s (bad) reputation, you always have to look at from whom the criticism comes. Reddit and the various forums of other Arch derivatives — not to mention Manjaro spinoffs — aren’t exactly the most intelligent and/or knowledgeable sources of information.
Even though certain criticisms were justified, many of the aforementioned people have an ax to grind with Manjaro for reasons of their own creation.
Yes, I have noticed that!
All the criticism comes from those who have nothing to do with Manjaro, and especially they have no idea how stable the distro actually is compared to PoP!_OS etc.
And they dont know how powerful the forum is, There are very experienced people on here, if we go to KDE Discuss or something, there’s noone interested for replying on topics other than showcase of their setup.
I went from Stable to Testing not long ago, and haven’t done anything differently or, in fact, have experienced anything different. But as with most, if not all, things Linux your results may vary. So keep timeshift handy, or however you do your backups, and see if it works for you.
Switched to testing a few years ago, if anything its been better especially as I use the aur a bit. I have the hook enabled to do automatic timeshift backups every time I run an update so I’ve always got a “system restore” option.
One thing I’d add that I’ve needed (due to windows nuking my grub) always keep an up to date live usb so you can use chroot to restore a back up or fix grub easily
