If you're capable of installing arch, then yes it's better.
Manjaro is more for those who are not. Really, the first time you install Arch you're stuck in pages and pages of wiki trying to make decisions like what kind of partition scheme you want, what kind of network configuration tool, what kind of disk encryption, blabla.
For people like you and me, this is fine. The idea is you learn from it as you go, you tailor the system to your needs. Personally I use FreeBSD, not Arch which takes a similar approach (a slight bit more guided) and is a little bit more opinionated but also offers some cool options not as readily available in the linux world.
But reality is, most people are not like us, they are already put off by a Next-Next-Finish installer. The Arch wiki might as well be in Chinese for them (or in Dutch, if the user just happens to be Chinese).
While I've never used Manjaro other than on a Live CD, I understand this is the usecase it tries to cover.
I don't think anyone is incapable of installing Arch, unless unwilling means incapable (or if that person is in a situation where they're prevented from installing it). Here's the installation guide: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/installation_guide. If you're a total newcomer to linux, you have to be willing to spend say, six hours, slowly going through the installation, carefully reading the guide, sometimes going back a step. If you're someone who's installed a distro before, it'll probably take less than 45 minutes. Unwilling is not incapable. The only prerequisites for installing Arch are a desire to use Arch and the good sense to Google "Arch installation guide".
That's exactly their point. Arch is my personal distro of choice for a number of reasons, but to go to someone, even if they're interested in it, and say "it's a great distribution! Here's an entire manual just on getting it installed, it only takes six hours!" will turn away all but the most curious of individuals. I personally do think it's a worthwhile endeavor, and not as hard as people say, but the first time you do it, it can seem like a Herculean task.
It’s an extremely good point. I went Linux for the first time in about 20 years recently. It was a raspberry pi and Manjaro had a 64 bit distro. It was a great experience, easy to get going, and made me fall in love with pacman and the aur, so I now use arch on everything.
Maybe there are better than Manjaro arch based starter distros, but for getting someone into Linux, my experience with Manjaro was great.
It's also worth adding that, as someone who's generally competent and has been bootstrapping/administrating linux computers for years, I recently burned most of a full day trying to get Arch on my laptop before giving up.
When the manual doesn't work (The most recent installer ISO I was using had versions of some commands where what the wiki said to do wasn't a valid flag) you're really gonna have a bad time. Especially when, as is seemingly often the case, you don't realize that the command you ran didn't do everything it needed to until 4-5 commands later when something entirely different fails.
I agree with you on all that, but regarding your first point, they shouldn’t have said capable, but rather “willing.” I think people are too quick to say “oh, I could never do that” when in reality they could, or could at least get pretty damn close to it.
You're being overly optimistic. I wasted half a day trying to dual boot arch alongside my existing windows 10 install on a dell xps 9700 a few months after it got released in 2020. I could not even get a DE working because of some issue with my dGPU driver.
I had my fair share of driver issues with manjaro as well but it was much easier to get going than arch despite the rich wiki.
I can imagine it's easier to install on older~ hardware with no dual boot though.
You don't have to bother with even that nowadays (except maybe to connect to wifi before installation). Arch ISOs nowadays come with an easy, self-explanatory TUI installer with which you can install it just as easily as you would install Ubuntu.
I used it for the first time last year on a work laptop, and had zero problems installing it. The documentation is great and very clear. Took me a couple of hours to get everything up and running, I think.
I ran arch for a little while and really did not like it. Of the ~10 distros I’ve used over the years, Arch was by far the least stable. Turns out I don’t want to be the alpha tester for every piece of software on my machine.
A distro like Manjaro that delays package updates for a few weeks seems preferable for me.
People say Arch is stable. Yes, it's stable until some nasty unexpected thing like the grub issue happens. Even though I'm willing to fix issues, I don't want to fix things accidentally when I need my PC to work.
What you’ve said above is why Manjaro doesn’t notionally make much sense to me. Manjaro is the intersect on the Venn diagram of “wants to be able to build everything up themselves and customize everything, at great time cost to self, and understand everything” and “wants a plug-and-play replacement for a traditional desktop OS” - in my experience, that overlap is 0 users.
I’ve been running Arch for almost a decade and it hasn’t been all easy, but I have a system now that I know in and out, is built exactly how I want it, etc. I have wanted to try Manjaro because I’ve heard good things about it, but what can it provide for me? Nothing.
Coming from the other side, if someone isn’t comfortable with a terminal and a lot of frustration, why would they look to an Arch distro? Debian or Fedora are much friendlier for first-time Linux users.
It seems to me that in trying to appeal to everyone, Manjaro has coincidentally appealed to no one.
I switched from Debian to Manjaro a few years ago after about ten years of using a Debian desktop. I can tell you that actually the main draw isn't customisability or anything of that kind: it is up to date software. Manjaro is rarely far behind its upstreams, unlike Debian.
What's more is it usually comes out the box with sane defaults, much like Debian. I've not had to do anything "technical" to run my desktop, any more than I would have to on an OSX laptop for work, say.
So it isn't really right to say Manjaro appeals to nobody. It appeals to the technically minded and impatient, which I am.
>Really, the first time you install Arch you're stuck in pages and pages of wiki
Not at all the case any more. Arch isos now come with an install script (literally just 'archinstall' from the live medium). I had never installed arch and it took me 15 minutes, it's a fully guided setup.
Can anyone care to explain why this is downvoted? I'm upvoting now so it may not continue to appear that way, but (besides that I loathe downvoted comments with no responses):
I'm a Manjaro user specifically because of the easy install. It's not that I'm not capable (Linux/sysadmin internals are interesting to me and I am often going down rabbit holes and exploring distro differences) but it's just that (a) when I want to install an OS I usually want to be up and running fast and (b) I'd like something with more conventions so when things do inevitably go wrong it's a bit easier to reason about the system relative to other users.
So I'm wondering if my next install should be Arch or one of the other Arch-based distro -- is archinstall not a 15 minute install or does it have some other pressing issue?
archinstall is fine. Especially if you don't have to do much complicated with the partitioning. It will get you a system pretty quickly.
The Arch community has a lot of toxicity. Maybe there's some sunk cost from people getting Arch installed the hard way, but it's full of the attitude that Arch should be hard.
I've seen hundreds of comments over the years making the same claim as you. I've never seen an instance of this alleged toxicity. The attitude people display is not "Arch should be hard" but that Arch provides excellent resources to learn how to use the system yourself, and that the Arch way is for you to figure things out yourself. Expecting to be handheld will result in people reminding you of this, often quite directly. But in my view, what is more toxic than people saying 'RTFM' is people destroying a community with low-effort "help me now!" spam devoid of proper debugging details or any evidence they've read the documentation and tried to work it out themselves before asking for help.
Nobody says "Arch is a great first choice of distro" except with the explicit qualifier "if you want to get your hands dirty and read a lot of documentation". So nobody that comes to Arch has any excuse, in my opinion, for not bothering to learn how to do it. Again this isn't the attitude "Arch should be hard". It's the attitude that you shouldn't expect other Arch users to spoonfeed you when they've already provided a comprehensive wiki and installation guide and there are searchable forums full of troubleshooting you can refer to. Arch isn't made hard on purpose, but as a natural consequence of the way it is structured (minimally) it is difficult for a completely new user to get going unless they read the documentation.
Ironically, projects like archinstall prove that difficulty isn't a goal but an unfortunate side-effect: they're perfectly happy to make things easier if it doesn't compromise the integrity of the project. They're not going to automatically install a desktop environment for everyone just to make things easier.
I'll just add to this, the reason there was no installer for around a decade was that nobody involved with Arch wanted to maintain an installer as their hobby. It was never an elitist thing, to me it's quite reasonable to not want to spend your free time on something you don't enjoy working on nor do you use.
Eventually someone joined the community who did want to maintain an installer, so now they have archinstall.
Yeah the last time I used arch (I guess about 4 years ago) that installer was in a pretty much permanent "under maintenance" state :) Cool to hear they fixed it since.
I have no problem with giving people a "Next-Next-Finish installer", but the system they get should reflect that. With Manjaro you do get quite a quirky distro and while the AUR is great, it is also a good way to create a very unstable system, especially when your system doesn't even use the Arch packages. This leaves the user quite exposed if anything should ever fail.
To be honest I think most people are better served with other distros, because they tend to deliver them the experience they actually want.
In my experience, Arch users have the opposite attitude. They want to empower you to fix your system yourself. On the Arch forums, even "silly" questions are usually met with a nod in the right direction at least, if not substantial back and forth help. Perhaps they're elitist in the sense that they believe Arch is a superior OS compared to many other options, but not in the sense of gatekeeping.
I do think it's superior OS compared to many alternatives which is precisely why I'm using it. likely there are better, I don't know. heck - you can even build whole Unix thing from scratch if you fancy so. but the problem with that is that Arch satisfies all my needs / ain't seeing advantages desirable enough elsewhere / I'm lazy.
I don't think that's the case. For me personally it gave me more control over my system and understanding.
Nothing elitist about that. Also the arch wiki has very high quality.
It is a good feeling to start with something minimal and build on it until you have something that is totally customized to your needs.
Sure you can start with a distro that has a lot of things preconfigured but you will need to reverse engineer first. Arch gives you the greenfield approach which is in my opinion more enjoyable.
It's not really hard anymore at all. The installer gives you a TUI with options to select what you want, and pretty sane defaults.
Setup is pretty easy and I would compare to the ease of Manjaro, although without the "snazzy gui" look, but very functionally equivalent TUI.
Can you elaborate on the "miles better" thing? I'm very close to provisioning several Linux machines. My home server is using Manjaro and has been rock-solid for 2.5 years now.
As someone who just switched to Endeavor on my desktop recently, I appreciate that it feels like the right amount of "you have all the power and options" that Arch promises, but also has the sort of "It just works out of the box" that I had with Ubuntu/Fedora.
The AUR is so nice, as you know. Not having to really mess around with Snap vs. Flatpak and the like and just using yay or pacman to get everything is amazing.
I'm not sure how much better it is than Manjaro, but it's just good. It feels like I could dive into doing things the hardcore Arch way any time I wanted, but also provides the UX tools to do most of the same things if you want the more simple option with some guardrails.
RE: your last paragraph, I do the same with Manjaro and I don't feel that you differentiated EndeavourOS (or Arch) at all.
In this entire thread several people basically say "Arch > Manjaro" and proceed to use the word "feel" multiple times which -- as I'm sure you can see -- is not a compelling and logical emotionless argument.
I've messed around on a Manjaro machine a lot and only broke it once (and I knew that I did so, it wasn't a random problem). It seems that nobody can answer clearly and differentiate one distro in favor of another. :|
Sure, and that's why I didn't claim Arch or Endeavour was better than Manjaro. I was just pointing out why I like it. A lot of this is gonna be subjective to what you want - under the hood, almost all of them are essentially the same, or could be made to be the same if you wanted.
- I had another poster say Arch is "flexible" -- as if Manjaro straight up disallows you to install new software? -- and I got confused what do they mean.
- Another one said too much software is installed by Manjaro out of the box and this is something that I half-agree with, but I still prefer that to Arch where you are booted to a root terminal and you are supposed to figure out how to make a basic functioning system (and I don't find that "having a root terminal in VGA mode on a blinding display contrast" constitutes "a basic functioning system").
- I think another one (but not on this thread) said they're not okay with Manjaro pre-setting some desktop environment visuals and settings for you. I super strongly disagree with them though, for reasons outlined below.
In general I spotted some tinge of elitism. It is strange to me that this still exists in 2023. A lot of us "the nerds" that tinkered with computers since teenagers are 40+ now and our work-life-hobby balance is tilting more and more towards the "life" part, so I personally prefer a system that gives me a working desktop environment with sensible defaults and yes, some extra software that I might not need, because after that me as an experienced programmer can clean up the machine to the extent I'd feel comfortable calling it "minimal" (always a subjective term, of course).
Oh, let's not even mention MHWD. I'd throw my hands in the air and never use Linux again -- very likely -- if that didn't exist. But I might be a bit extreme here, I hear that a good amount of distros have high-quality hardware detectors and automatic (at OS installing time, I mean) installers of the right drivers / kernel modules. But for now I am not keen on going out of my comfortable zone to experiment.
Yea, my read is that Endeavour and Manjaro are fairly similar in goals and user-friendliness. In general, I think Manjaro is perhaps a bit more opinionated in terms of UX and general stuff I've heard about the maintainers and their packaging opinions, while Endeavour feels a bit more like "Arch but with some presets and helpers".
I had problems with manjaro in regards to package updates and kernel management. As I understood, manjaro uses pacman in a weird way by wrapping it with pamac. Pamac was unable, at least for me, to update/install a single specific package without updating the whole system first. This made daily usage a living hell, because packages that are built from source can make a "htop" installation last 30 mins. On the other hand, yay is by far the best package manager I've ever used.
EDIT: Also, supposedly, Manjaro team has some management issues.
Manjaro is more for those who are not. Really, the first time you install Arch you're stuck in pages and pages of wiki trying to make decisions like what kind of partition scheme you want, what kind of network configuration tool, what kind of disk encryption, blabla.
For people like you and me, this is fine. The idea is you learn from it as you go, you tailor the system to your needs. Personally I use FreeBSD, not Arch which takes a similar approach (a slight bit more guided) and is a little bit more opinionated but also offers some cool options not as readily available in the linux world.
But reality is, most people are not like us, they are already put off by a Next-Next-Finish installer. The Arch wiki might as well be in Chinese for them (or in Dutch, if the user just happens to be Chinese).
While I've never used Manjaro other than on a Live CD, I understand this is the usecase it tries to cover.