I’ve seen a lot of people who quite dislike Manjaro, and I’m not really sure why. I’m myself am not a Manjaro user, but I did use it for quite a while and enjoyed my experienced, as it felt almost ready out of the box. I’m not here to judge, just wanted to hear the opinion of the community on the matter. Thanks!
This site gives some reasons: https://manjarno.snorlax.sh/
I don’t know. I don’t feel right if not arch like something missing
I use Manjaro ARM on my Orange PI because I couldn’t get Arch ARM to work on it, while Manjaro has support of my devices out of the box. Since I installed a minimal possible version (without any DE), it doesn’t feel bloated or something. It feels like I’m using Arch but with slower updates. Overall, it’s good and I don’t notice much difference from Arch. But anyway, I haven’t tried it for a desktop station.
I have an XFCE VM of Manjaro I regularly use and it’s a great distribution. I converted mine to unstable, which just means it pulls down Arch packages right away so closer to Endeavor OS or ArcoLinux (there is also stable and testing). They have some nice tools and very easy to change kernels. I think some people have had it break something and get butt hurt, but that’s part of bleeding edge Arch and being on a rolling release. Either watch the forum for issues, or be prepared to fix it, roll back… Some of us think life is too short to do a manual Arch install, so these Arch based distros that are easy to install are great, and add some extra value and tools on top of Arch.
I installed Manjaro sometime during 2018, and I have been using it without any major issues. The only issue I had is when AUR packages fail to update. I find that most of the time the issue will resolve itself eventually anyway. Overall, I feel that Manjaro is a nice and stable distro.
The only negative I can think of is the community. At the time, I was bluntly told to read the manual whenever I needed help or pointers. But, my negative experience was from a few years ago, so hopefully the community has improved today.
My daily driver distro today is Mint, which I think is more polished than Manjaro.
