I am a Linux noobie and have only used Mint for around six months now. While I have definitely learned a lot, I don’t have the time to always be doing crazy power user stuff and just want something that works out of the box. While I love Mint, I want to try out other decently easy to use distros as well, specifically not based on Ubuntu, so no Pop OS. Is Manjaro a possibly good distro for me to check out?
I’ll try to be unbiased during this, but I am biased against Manjaro personally.
I think as a distro they have good defaults for someone who wants to just dive in and start using it, I like that they have a ton of editions where you can pretty much just start off with whatever one you like.
However, they have had quite a few issues, some innocent mistakes, some larger, but these have had some bad effects that have caused many to lose their trust for it in terms of stability and security, including me. Whether that causes you to trust or not trust them though is a different story. Some of these issues are listed here.
In terms of user friendliness, they make a lot of things very easy, especially graphics card driver and choosing kernel versions via some nice GUI tools they use, and there is a decently large community to find support and ask questions on, but best to make sure you’re asking specifically for Manjaro, as it is far enough away from Arch that some solutions or fixes won’t work and vice versa.
They also have a consistent visual design/color theme, some like it, some hate it, but it’s pretty consistent for those who it matters to.
I would consider using them again personally, but I am on a different distro I’m happy with currently, and will keep an eye on them to see how they improve over the years. I think some of their methods are flawed, but they are passionate about what they do.
I can’t really recommend for or against using it directly, but I hope this info helps you make a decision for it.