So I’ve been iso live testing Manjaro KDE Plasma lately and it looks very polished.
On the other hand, there is a negative vibe towards it.
Why the hate?
I’ll keep it short and sweet.
I’ve been using Manjaro for about 6 years now.
When I had an Nvidia GPU, it would break after quite a few updates and need a rollback.
Then I moved to an AMD card, and I haven’t had any issues at all.
Like…at all.
The End.
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I ran Manjaro happily for a while because I was scared of the Arch installation process. A couple of years ago, though, an update broke my system. By then, the archinstall script had come along so I tried installing Arch with that and I haven’t looked back.
I’ve had it break many times during update. Don’t get me wrong, I liked it at first, but if you want a system that works after update, you’re probably better checking elsewhere. Linux Mint, and Kubuntu are far better simplicity wise. Open Suse or Arch if you want rolling updates.
I used to be a huge Manjaro fan. There were many ways it let me down, some of which were just bad governance.
The biggest problem though is the AUR. Manjaro uses packages that are older than Arch. The AUR assumes the Arch packages. This, if your use the AUR with Manjaro, your system will break.
It is not a question of if Manjaro will break but when. Every ex-Manjaro user has the same story.
For me, EndeavourOS is everything that Manjaro should be.
if your use the AUR with Manjaro, your system will break.
If your system breaks because of AUR it means you’re using AUR wrong… you’re not supposed to use AUR packages for critical system functions. It will break on Arch too if you do that.
The AUR doesn’t assume arch packages, if the package your aur script wants isn’t in your repo then the package simply fails to update/install.
Edit: This is true even for Arch linux, as the Aur package might be out of date.
There are many cases where Manjaro causes problems. For example, a package mag already be in Arch but not yet in Manjaro. Or perhaps the Manjaro package is not a high enough version number. If another Arch package requires this first package, in Arch it would grab the Arch package. The Arch package will be maintained over time. In Manajaro, the package is not there and so the AUR grabs it from the AUR as well. Perhaps it is even the Git version with an unclear version number. Over time, the AUR dependency breaks or becomes unmaintained. Even once Manjaro has the package, it may not migrate it because of the version numbers. Now things are broken. This exact thing happened to me on Manjaro where my GIMP ended up using GEGL from the AUR. My system was broken for months.
An even worse problem can happen when there are alternate dependencies. Sometimes in the AUR you will have multiple packages that fulfill a dependency. In Arch, you can see if one is from the actual repos and one is itself from the AUR. Again, if you choose the one in the repos, it will work and stay supports. In Manjaro, neither may be coming from the actual repos in which case it is easy to choose the wrong one. This sets you up to have package conflicts. In Manjaro, I would never know that the other option had now been added to the repos. More than once, I had the dependency that I had chosen break when the other would still have been fine.
Ok, this is getting long and that was just a couple of scenarios.
Suffice it to say, when I used Manjaro, I got the impression that the AUR broke all the time and that using the AUR broke my install from time to time. Now that I use Arch, I do not have those issues and I realize that it was Manjaro all along.
That’s not how source packages work. The only way they’d break is in case of major upstream changes. Which do happen, but the only inconvenience would be recompiling the package. Which you’re supposed to do anyway.
Do you reinstall your AUR packages after an update? If yes, you will never see them break on Manjaro or Arch. If you don’t, they will break on both Manjaro and Arch.
I am not theorizing. And I am not taking about source code not compiling. I am talking about dependencies which includes the reports version numbers and version number expectations of packages maintained by different parties. Those broke all the time for me on Manjaro and it was often because of the differences between what was in the Arch repos vs the Manjaro repos.
When Manjaro fell behind at one point, I ended up with a version of GEGL ( labeled - git ) being pulled from the AUR. Later releases of GIMP refused to upgrade over that version of GEGL. I just lived with it for a few months hoping it would clear itself up but it never did. I basically had to back everything my out and install again. Not that it was hard but these kinds of annoyances happened for me all the time on Mnajaro and basically never on EbdeavourOS or Arch.
What made me move away from Manjaro to begin with were all the problems it had with the dotnet packages at the time. I blamed dotnet and the AUR and was amazed that the problems went away when I used EndeavourOS instead.
If what you describe were true it would make AUR packages fail (on any Arch distro) if the user failed to upgrade their system each time, every time an update came out. The two week delay practiced by Manjaro is a completely arbitrary period of timen in the grand scheme of things. There are users who only upgrade once a month or even more seldom and nothing like this happens to them.
I have manjaro running on six machines. No problems that were not Just part of learning. Two of those computers were for testing different distros… All ended up with Manjaro.
Hate is for people that don’t create, or improve their own world.
I haven’t seen this mentioned yet, and there’s a good number of responses so maybe I’m up in the night, but it seems to me Manjaro’s philosophy is somewhat counterintuitive to Arch’s. Arch pointedly obfuscates system internals as little as is reasonable to “keep it simple” from a system perspective. Manjaro simplifies things for the user but creates additional obfuscation. I can see some people who value Arch’s approach being less than amenable to that.
But that’s not a reason to not use it. If Manjaro’s approach appeals to you, use it.
BTW, I don’t use Arch (at the moment)
Mostly misdirected anger from two categories — Arch purists who balk at the notion of someone modding their beloved distro, and newbs who blame Manjaro for issues they create themselves and they would have on any Arch-based distro.
Mostly misdirected anger from two categories — Arch purists who balk at the notion of someone modding their beloved distro, and newbs who blame Manjaro for issues they create themselves and they would have on any Arch-based distro.
Nope not at all. The built in and by Manjaro maintained packagemanager pamac bricks systems. Has not bricked mine since i use pacman instead.
The packages are just the arch packages delayed by a few days which makes it incompatible with the (by default enabled an encouraged to use) AUR.
Here is a total list of what is wrong with it: https://github.com/arindas/manjarno
I used Manjaro for about 3 years
Its great but packages tend to break over time with it being a “stable” arch build
Over that 3 year period updates managed to break my install at least 30 times
Switched to Endeavour over a year ago and haven’t had an update break my install yet
That sounds more unstable than plain Arch.
Except it’s pure bull. I’ve been using it for years on the stable branch and I’ve never had anything break.
Anecdotal, but good for you.
The real question is, why are you considering Manjaro in the first place? What does it do that a different distro, without all the hate (which I personally think are 100% justified), doesn’t do? Why “risk” it?
I’m an openSuse user for quite some time without any issues tbh. Just wanted to enter the Arch world and see if there is any significant difference.
Then literally just use Arch. I don’t understand why people want Arch but then install something different. If you don’t want to go through the install process then it’s honestly just not for you, but if you really want to try anyway give EndeavourOS a shot.
In short, the maintainers have made questionable decisions over the years, and the Arch Linux packages are held back by two weeks on Manjaro for… basically no reason.
If you want an out-of-the-box solution to Arch Linux, just use EndeavourOS.
This. Manjaro isn’t trash, but there are better options. This coming from a guy who used manjaro and loved it for years.
It’s not all “purists” and “tribalism”, Manjaro actually has issues. Besides the well known certificate issues and older packages, I have the following anecdote which made me really dislike it.
A friend has Manjaro and one day his nvidia drivers stopped working after an update. I helped troubleshoot over the phone, while looking over the wiki. For nvidia drivers they have their own wrapper around pacman.
Turns out there’s a different nvidia driver for each kernel version. Already a stupid design. So unlike arch where there’s 1 kernel package (the latest the distro offers) and 1 matching nvidia driver, Manjaro has dozens…
The wiki never mentions how to install or update the drivers manually with pacman or anything like that. It pushes their own tool, a stupid wrapper around pacman, which is supposed to manage this for you.
In my friend’s case, the tool failed. It was trying to run pacman but there was a conflict issue. But the tool didn’t show the pacman output, so we couldn’t figure out what the tool is trying to do, and why it doesn’t work. We tried removing the tool and re-installing, and all kinds of messing around with it. It failed to install the drivers, it failed to remove the drivers, it kept failing whatever we tried.
Eventually we figured out the naming convention they used for the packages (again not mentioned in the wiki), and manage to install the correct kernel - driver pair manually, using pacman.
Tl;dr: poor design, bad documentation, and they push their own crappy tools which hinder instead of helping
there’s a different nvidia driver for each kernel version. Already a stupid design
That’s not a stupid design at all. A nvidia kernel module artifact is only compatible with exactly one kernel ABI. Thus you need one binary nvidia package for each kernel you ship.
Arch also has one package for every kernel ABI they ship:
nvidiaandnvidia-lts.
Though it should be noted that their design assumes that these two ABIs are the only possible ABIs which isn’t strictly the case as the zen, hardened or RT variants may sometimes lag behind their regular counterpart. That’s a stupid design if anything as it increases the friction of kernel ABI upgrades as a kernel package maintainer.We at NixOS also ship the nvidia module for each of our ~50 kernel variants; all major versions of the Nvidia module compatible with that kernel in fact.
The only possible way to access these nvidia kernel modules is via a certain kernel’slinuxPackagesattribute set that contains all packages that rely on a kernel ABI such as kernel modules or packages likeperf. That’s good design if you ask me but I’m obviously biased ;)I know you need a new nvidia driver every time the kernel updates, but why keep 50 kernel versions? My beef was them offering so many (outdated) versions instead of keeping the latest one which would make things very simple for users (imo).
These aren’t all versions per se but mostly variants, versions and versions of variants. For example, we have packaged the xanmod kernel which is a modified kernel optimised for desktop use but it has two variants: Main and LTS. We have packaged both.
Here are the names of all of our kernels currently to give you an idea (as a JSON list):
[ "linuxPackages", "linuxPackages-libre", "linuxPackages-rt", "linuxPackages-rt_latest", "linuxPackages_4_14", "linuxPackages_4_19", "linuxPackages_4_19_hardened", "linuxPackages_4_9", "linuxPackages_5_10", "linuxPackages_5_10_hardened", "linuxPackages_5_15", "linuxPackages_5_15_hardened", "linuxPackages_5_18", "linuxPackages_5_19", "linuxPackages_5_4", "linuxPackages_5_4_hardened", "linuxPackages_6_0", "linuxPackages_6_1", "linuxPackages_6_1_hardened", "linuxPackages_6_2", "linuxPackages_6_3", "linuxPackages_6_4", "linuxPackages_6_5", "linuxPackages_6_5_hardened", "linuxPackages_6_6", "linuxPackages_custom", "linuxPackages_custom_tinyconfig_kernel", "linuxPackages_hardened", "linuxPackages_latest", "linuxPackages_latest-libre", "linuxPackages_latest_hardened", "linuxPackages_latest_xen_dom0", "linuxPackages_latest_xen_dom0_hardened", "linuxPackages_lqx", "linuxPackages_rpi0", "linuxPackages_rpi02w", "linuxPackages_rpi1", "linuxPackages_rpi2", "linuxPackages_rpi3", "linuxPackages_rpi4", "linuxPackages_rt_5_10", "linuxPackages_rt_5_15", "linuxPackages_rt_5_4", "linuxPackages_rt_6_1", "linuxPackages_testing", "linuxPackages_testing_bcachefs", "linuxPackages_xanmod", "linuxPackages_xanmod_latest", "linuxPackages_xanmod_stable", "linuxPackages_xen_dom0", "linuxPackages_xen_dom0_hardened", "linuxPackages_zen" ](Note that some of these are aliases;
linuxPackages_latestis currentlylinuxPackages_6_6for example.)Each of these has the following
nvidiaPackages(modulo incompatibilities):[ "beta", "dc", "dc_520", "latest", "legacy_340", "legacy_390", "legacy_470", "production", "stable", "vulkan_beta" ](Again, some of these are aliases.)
This is useful to have because users might have hardware constraints. It’s not hard to imagine a scenario where a user might have a WiFi chip that only works with kernel ABIs < 5.4 and require the 470 nvidia driver for their old GPU. Packaging just the latest kernel and just the latest Nvidia driver would make this user unable to use their system.
Basically, the Manjaro team has no idea what they’re doing.
The ManjarNO sheep can fuck off to Reddit for all I care.
No hate from me,but rather a simple question? Why use preconfigured distros instead of the original,always best, with
archinstallscript? You can even install pamac or whatever package installer tool manjaro uses.
