What are the advantages or disadvantages to using Manjaro instead of Ubuntu-based distros?

This is not because of rolling release vs iteration release (version freeze) distros.

It’s everything to do with the package naming convention that Arch (for whatever reason) decided to settle with a long time ago…

Read the subsection titled: “I have to mention this, even if it’s unpopular: a distro like Ubuntu handles kernel updates properly”.

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Anything Debian-based is prone to often breaking its packages out of the blue, that includes Mint. There’s nothing “better” in life than watching a movie and out of nowhere getting a message “you have broken packages, please fix them”. It’s just that debian’s package manager is… well, inferior compared to pacman. Not to mention the other flaw of apt - if you install a program, it will download the most of the dependencies but if it doesn’t work or if you don’t like it and decide to uninstall it, apt WILL NOT remove the downloaded dependencies. In time that leads to a distro size that rivals the size of a Windows 10. :rofl: When I used to use Mint, I had times when its installation had become 75 GB for exactly that reason. If you know which dir to visit and to delete the unnecessary files, then it’s OK, but if you’re a green user, like I was back then, it’s quite frustrating.

Pacman is the exact opposite of apt - if you download 58 packages (1 program and 57 dependencies), then that’s the number of packages that will be removed upon uninstallation. Ever since I started using Arch, I forgot what a broken package was, LOL

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For me, I installed Manjaro KDE on Tuesday 16th, it’s performance. Apps running on Manjaro seem to use less CPU making them more responsive. For example my Virtual Box VMs load a lot faster. Even Firefox, the way I run it… as multiple instances, not Multiple Windows, seems much more responsive.

This for me is a return to KDE, after about 10 or so years, and I’m quite impressed.

I was using Ubuntu and Linux Mint, Linux Mint up until last Weekend, when an 11 hour Upgrade left my desktop mostly broken. That why I decided, after some testing, to move to Manjaro KDE.

Based on what I’m experiencing, it is unlikely I will return to Ubuntu or Linux Mint.

Yeah, me too. But I love updating. Some people hate it, and for those, I think updating Manjaro every couple of months should be OK, but not anything beyond that.

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Yeah you’re right, i’ve found that when distros claim to be ‘stable’ what they really mean is that package updates are infrequent, that’s basically it, it doesn’t mean it’s less crash prone or anything like you’d think it would mean.

This kind of stability is important… For servers and enterprise environments; it means behavior of your os or software will not suddenly changelike it can on rolling release distros (e.g. you update some library and some software and maybe the ui is a lil different for that software or the library is not backwards compatible with some software that was made for an older version of that library, etc)

So the real benefit to ‘stable’ distros is really mostly for industrial/corporate applications (it’s the same kind of deal where some governments still use unix machines from the 70s and 80s for stuff because it works and they can’t be bothered to upgrade to new technology/software as that would mean retraining the employees that operate it).

It’s not for consumers/end users, since us consumers generally want the latest versions of stuff so we can have the coolest new features and such (which is exactly how it works on windows for instance) therefore rolling release is actually better for most people. Because most people don’t wanna wait a year to get the latest update (by which time it will certainly no longer be ‘latest’) for some software they use a lot, they’ll want it preferably on day one if it’s an important update.

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sudo apt autoremove

gets rid of unused dependencies, and any old kernels up to the 3rd most recent (by default)

The problem I had with Linux Mint is that for some reason the system Upgrade is way more complicated than it should be In my opinion. Ubuntu is pretty straight forward.

Given that I always install with 3 Partitions (root, home and swap), normally I would simply install the latest version of LM over the top of the older version, then reinstall any missing applications, and replace any I have alternatives for, but at some point the number of not part of the standard install applications become quite large, so I decided to use the LM Upgrade tool, to my detriment.

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