If Arch is that good, then it’s a win-win for all of us. By using Manjaro, one can switch to Arch 100% later on if the person feels comfortable and ready to do more advanced stuff via commandline. My guess is that going from Ubuntu to Arch might be a lot harder than going from Manjaro to Arch. The way I see it is that Manjaro can be a training ground for Arch for those not yet ready for pure Arch. If the user doesn’t feel the need for more advanced customization (Arch), then Manjaro is still a good distro at the end of the day.
Generally, Manjaro users are either newbie or Arch Veteran. Let’s just say we are tired of tuning and configuring. Manjaro does that for us.
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First of it all: Many thanks to the Manjaro Team and the Wider community for this wonderful and exceptionally well mannered discussion!..
Different apples to different individuals.
Again: One must understand that, like in pretty much everything in this life, there is no such a thing named “Perfect OS”… There are near the perfect OSes for you to chose from. Choice is then the salt of life!.. And that most times need to make evolving and compromising decisions… I started my computing journey as many out there on the long gone Windows 3.11 times… I saw all the evolution from there to now. Windows 3.11 was far more difficult to deal with than Manjaro is today… MS Windows was my compromising solution from there till 2009 when I discovered Ubuntu… The idea of an app store plus all the graphical facilitators that Ubuntu was advertising at the time called me… Oh, and an almost no viruses environment, of course!.. Then come 2013 and the always reinvent of the wheel on Canonical’s part led me to Linux Mint where I was from there till last Christmas… Then the lack of Mint’s performance on my old machine coupled with the apparently lack of current enthusiasm on the Mint’s team made me to distro hop for quite a while… And finally I discovered Manjaro Cinnamon where I’m happy now, and hoping for a long time on it!.. In conclusion: Use what better suits you and your needs!..
As for Manjaro vs Arch; as I said in the beginning: Different product for different needs. Unless you’re on a very specific or brand new sort of hardware installation, the unique, and indeed pretty much valuable use case for what I can see pure Arch is for IT schools. It provides an ideal way for IT students to understand the “ins and outs” of what an Operative System is about. Otherwise, and apart a few old school, very advanced, and somewhat nostalgic of those days of the Windows 3.11 individuals, I can see no advantage on pure Arch anymore… Because, by and large, most of us, including the IT professionals, just want to have our work done, and most importantly, most of us just want to be those “eternal newbies”. Manjaro fortunately fills these needs almost like nobody else now!.. In some ways Manjaro is today for Arch what back in the day Ubuntu was for Debian, and what, even today, Linux Mint is for Ubuntu, but in this case in a far larger scale!..
Congrats to the Manjaro Team and community!..
Have a nice day!..
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Tuning and configuring is the whole point of free software and gnu/linux.
edit: and of course your freedom to not be controlled as a whole.
Yeah but there some slight differences between by example Gentoo or Linux From Scratch in one side, and Ubuntu in the other…
For me, Manjaro offers sane defaults that I am likely to choose with my installation for general desktop use, and I have been nothing but happy with it (installed using minimal KDE iso). The community has always seemed very welcoming and friendly, which I think is a big factor as well. I guess it all comes down to use case and preference 
.
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no. that’s not the point at all.
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Manjaro is a more preconfigured Arch for the desktop with saner defaults and a friendlier setup, where you have to do less low-level stuff yourself. Arch is also fine if you have a) more time, b) more low-level Linux know-how and c) don’t mind if some of the many bleeding-edge updates break some stuff here and there (which also requires more time to troubleshoot). With Arch, you exactly get to know how you set up your system, because you do every single step by yourself (since there is no setup, just a shell with command-line tools). It’s a good experience if you have never done it before, and I would recommend doing it at least once (can be in a VM), but it’s not necessary or “better” to do it that way all the time. I’m fine with having an abstraction layer above that stuff. I have documented my last Arch installation (documented every command entered + file edited), in case I need to reference something again.
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Hi.
I moved from XP to Linux about 8 years ago & have used Manjaro in all of that time. I tried installing Arch twice & failed both times.
I have very little technical knowledge & yet I have run my business on Manjaro for all this time. I bought a new machine 3 years ago & have not experienced a broken system.
Arch is well respected & Manjaro is built from it’s DNA - however, I am pretty sure I would experience more breakages after updates with Arch. For your average user with limited technical knowledge or time to maintain the system, I see Manjaro as much more suitable.
Arch is great I am sure, but I could not recommend it to my non-Linux friends, to replace Windows 10 or Mac. It is like a high performance car - good if you know what you are doing. Otherwise, you will crash sooner or later.
More power to Arch & Manjaro!
Ruziel
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I have done an arch install. Then i realized something: i don’t remember all the stuff i need in 1 day.
The thing is, the day will come when i’m at work with my laptop and i quickly need to do something. And then i realize that some tool or whatever is missing, and i need to go through some wiki pages to install it, configure it and make it work. And i get frustrated because i need to work and i can’t.
What i love about Manjaro is that everything is ready by default. Even if i forget something, i can quickly install it in seconds, no need to read wiki pages. I know eventually the Arch setup will cover everything you need overtime, but that takes time… and for me personally, i don’t have it available
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I’ve been a long-time Arch user. I still love Arch. It’s just that I’d prefer it if Arch was slightly less “bleeding edge” sometimes (or slightly more conservative with their frequent updating) and if there would at least be an option to have a somewhat nicely preconfigured desktop installation instead of this ever-basic single template which you then must configure to your needs (which takes much longer than starting from a nice desktop configuration out of the box). Manjaro just feels a bit nicer for desktop use while still having pretty much all of the Arch advantages. I mean it’s nice to configure everything from scratch sometimes, but it also gets dull after doing it several times. It’s GREAT if you want to learn more about the Linux ecosystem, but not so great if you just want a quick decent desktop based on Arch. That’s why I chose Manjaro over Arch for the installation on my new PC. But I see them as 2 flavors of the same thing.
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I just like the name and the logo.
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And the colours! Don’t forget the colours!
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This is a big minus to some, but I like the fact that packages are held back. It’s theoretically more stable, and there are fewer updates at any given time compared to Arch, which supposedly gets updates every single day.
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I have been using Linux for a couple of decades now, and although there was a time in my life when digging into the Arch Wiki and building everything from scratch would have appealed to me, that time seems to have passed.
Something about pushing 60 and having lots of things I want to do before I die, and realizing that spending my days elbow-deep in config files has dropped much farther down the list than it used to be.
Everyone’s mileage varies, of course. I’m learning music theory and composition (I mean, the formal way; I have been writing music since I was tall enough to reach the piano keys, but played by ear mostly until my early 40s); I’m trying to understand more about digital signal processing so that I can do some fairly code-intensive experiments in sound design and experimental sample chopping and arranging; every couple of years I learn more about digital graphics and generative code; I am in the middle of writing about five or six long prose pieces and I have lost track of the number of poems I am working on (poets don’t finish poems. They abandon them.); and I still haven’t finished my reading lists from grad school, although I did get my degree 15 years ago.
Somebody else might spend their so-called Golden Years learning GNU/Linux inside-out, backpacking every weekend, driving around whatever continent is closest to them. I would be one of those people if I weren’t, you know, me.
Right now I need my computers to Just Work, or close enough. But I’m not about to hop back on Apple’s train, which has pretty much jumped the rails into single-minded accumulation of profit as far as I can tell.
And I want up-to-date software, so Debian-based distros don’t do it for me. I tried one of the Arch-based distros that basically sets you up with a minimal config, and I liked it well enough, but the first update borked the whole system. Which, yeah, is fixable, and the fixing is even fun. But at this point it is a distraction to me.
I wouldn’t call Manjaro “Arch for Dummies”. More like “Arch for People with Other Things They Need to Be Doing”.
How’s that? Right now, Manjaro is better for me than any other distro I have tried so far. You prefer Arch? Cool. Personally, if did choose Arch, I would try to avoid taking on the geekier than thou vibes of the Arch world, if only because there are so many other things in the world worth learning as well as Linux. One only has so many lifetimes.
One, I think it is?
I know. When we were 20, it seemed the number was much higher, didn’t it.
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To me Manjaro is not as bleeding-edge and personally that’s perfect, I only update when Pack manager “tells” me too otherwise I just “work”, to be honest I look at the icon(Pack manager) a lot, and it’s always a rush when I see the dot, means there is something to update, and I am always curious, I do have Arch on a VM and Arch is great and comes “clean” on my Manjaro install I had to do some cleaning, but it’s an easy thing, just like on Arch you need to install on Manjaro I had to uninstall some stuff I don’t use.
I love Manjaro for being Arch based.
Manjaro is like “2 clicks Install” and now I prefer that, Arch is the same thing pretty much you just need to go “old school” and that is what makes Linux what it is, Manjaro team just does that job for us, so thank you Manjaro.
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After many months of Manjaro I can now also confirm that it being less bleeding edge than Arch also means that fewer things can go bad when updating. It’s not a big thing, but there were some small issues with Arch updates every now and then which you had to resolve manually. With Manjaro, I’ve had zero update issues so far. But considering that Arch is so bleeding-edge, it’s actually really stable in that regard, and issues that do happen are small. But it does make Manjaro a bit nicer to use, because most users don’t need the absolute bleeding-edge, but they for sure will appreciate having less potential issues when updating. So that’s a nice little bonus of Manjaro. Which I expected of course going from Arch to Manjaro.
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I watched it and really not understand why the hate was directed to Manjaro specifically.
The pamac+pacman problem doesn’t exist on my end. I literally use them on Stable branch interchangeably and never had a single issue.
Same hooks run, same result.
The two filemanagers on single system can result from some random AUR package. I have not seen any such dependency hell as he makes it look like.
you are right, of course
this is YouTube (re what Luke Smith was saying here or anywhere previously)
It’s opinion - facts don’t really matter.
And the weight of the mentioned “facts” might change over time.
and:
there is money to be made from it - even more if the delivered POV changes ever so often …
… keep the channel alive …
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He’s basically judging Manjaro based on what someone else did, he haven’t tried Manjaro on their machine to do a proper criticism. He is also deleting comments that criticizes him. I’ve commented there, explaining why he is wrong and my comment is gone.
As far as I’ve noticed, Pamac seems to work as a GUI front-end for pacman. For me it works normally, there is no problem of using one or another. I use it interchangeably as well.
On Manjaro Wiki, it says: Pamac is Manjaro’s package manager. It is based on libalpm with AUR and Appstream support. It focuses on providing an easy to use interface while still providing a powerful set of features.
Not sure about the file system, he said it was unable to drag and drop files from the desktop or file manager, something like this. The only DE that I know such problems occur is GNOME since GNOME devs removed the ability to use the desktop and to drag and drop files from the desktop (if using an extension to enable it) to the file manager and vice-versa. The other file manager he’s talking about could be ranger. I don’t know why ranger comes installed in recent versions of Manjaro.
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