Today i learned that manjaro has, in parts, german roots and is maintained by a german company. For that i, as a german myself, want to strongly apologize in the name of the german people!!
Germany also gave us openSUSE so its ok
Everyone knows real germans use OpenSUSE
Tumbleweed!
It’s so good, it does not deserve to be in such a niche today.
I think the Arch derivatives that are more user friendly than Arch kind of took over the Tumbleweed niche. More compatible, more popular, access to AUR, not tied to a corporation, some bundle proprietary software, etc. I still like Tumbleweed but that’s why I left personally.
It’s nice to see so many options in the Arch space.
I particularly like that they run the gamut between sink-or-swim and mommy-knows-best, so there’s something for everybody.
Even with some that are kind of opinionated like Cachy, you can still change it to be the way you want, and they make it easy to do so. Unlike ElementaryOS or whatnot.
Arch has, in parts, Canadian roots and was originally developed by a Canadian programmer. For that I, as a Canadian myself, want to strongly say “you’re welcome” in the name of the Canadian people!!
thank you <3
I think as with most things, Manjaro does have a niche. I like Arch for a whole load of reasons and I’ve previously used it for years (although I’ve now moved to NixOS ).
But the company I work for has a great policy of letting people use whatever OS they want. I normally go with Manjaro because it’s “Archy” enough to satisfy me but it’s much easier & faster to install fresh - which matters if you get a new work laptop every year and want to get started quickly.
There is EndeavourOS if you really want Arch for the lazy. It is basically just arch with an additional repo from the EOS devs with themes and their own tools. You get preconfigured DE and WM installations. Would always prefer it over Manjaro.
It’s niche is entirely served by EndeavorOS tho. And EndeavourOS knows how to set up a cron job to keep their ssl certificates up to date💀
Cheers for the rec! I’ll take a look at it next time I go to upgrade.
I like to call it “Arch for the lazy”.
It takes all sorts.
It is precisely Arch for the lazy! In some circumstances that’s a negative, others a benefit.
You should really use endeavoros for this, manjaros team is wildly incompetent and does way too much (which is a problem since they can’t get the basics right)
Arch now has archinstall. So the setup is pretty fast. And if you sync your dotfiles, and have a list of packages to install, you can setup in an hour or so
From someone who installed manjaro because I thought it’d be easier arch, but did not last more than a month
As not American, wanna appologize for Microsoft Windows in the name of the American people xD
can’t apologize that :D
I like Manjaro! What’s wrong with it?
Their SSL certs keep expiring and they have a weird package release schedule on a ~2wk delay from base Arch, which causes half of the AUR (or any custom pacman repos) to break in unpredictable ways due to out-of-sync packages.
They have had their fair share of (sometimes easily avoidable) fuck-ups.
Stuff like:
- letting their websites SSL certificate expire (multiple times)
- telling users to set the date in their OS back to when the cert was still valid as a workaround
- accidentally DDoS’ing the AUR (I think multiple times too?)
- IIRC also some internal struggle about how to use the money donated to them
Especially the SSL cert hurts. They cannot auto-renew their websites SSL cert (and didn’t seem to learn from their first mistake) and they want to maintain a linux distro?
The “internal struggle” was actually related to the rest and (hopefully) sorted out the other issues.
The tl;dr is that Manjaro was setup as a company with one owner who often didn’t do what he was supposed to and no one else had access to do it. This caused issues like the SSL stuff but also other things. Obviously this made quite some volunteers leave over time, but as the distro itself is actually quite nice also a bunch didn’t want to give up that easily. Those pretty much gave that one person the choice to transfer the distro to a new to-be-made non-profit (leaving only the commercial activities in the company) or they would leave (and likely fork it or something). He agreed and they’re now in the legal process of setting up the non-profit, where important things will not be in the hands of a single person.
So all with all it was a bit messy, but it seems they got it sorted out now. That should also prevent issues like they’ve seen in the past. So with that I wouldn’t recommend against the distro. I still have it on some secundairy systems, where my main one (I need to say this naturally) got switched during the drama to run Arch (btw).
You can read more here: https://forum.manjaro.org/t/manjaro-2-0-manifesto/186171
When did all this unfold? Didn’t the cert expire again, like, yesterday? When will they switch leadership?
He agreed and they’re now in the legal process of setting up the non-profit
Sort of. He said he was open to the general idea but raised a bunch of provisions and then ghosted everybody. I don’t think there’s been any further communication for the last few months.
That’s good to know
Fair enough. I can play HalfLife Alyx on it, and that makes me happy.
What hardware and software do you use for this? I’ve been trying on and off for maybe a year trying to get an HP Reverb G2 working with envision/monado. My most recent struggles were with lining up build dependencies, like boost, cnmatrix, etc., which I chalked up to version incompatiblies between Manjaro/AUR.
I have a Lenovo Legion 7 laptop with an 2070 super Max Q. I play with a Quest 2 over Steam Play. It’s amazing.
Why don’t you just use SteamVR?
Quest 2 is a solid headset, but imo you should be running it through a pihole to block Facebook telemetry, that thing sends a truly Astonishing amount of data to Facebook.
Fair enough
I can’t remember exactly what they were, but I had issues with getting the headset to work with only SteamVR. I’ll have to give it another go when I get time. It seems maybe standalone headsets like the Quest lineup fare much better than PCVR headsets on Linux. https://wiki.vronlinux.org/docs/hardware/
Interesting. They’ve made big headway with SteamVR with the Frame coming out.
Another Manjaro user, there are dozens of us!
Unite!
Outside of what Hamsda said (to which I’ve added some context), the thing with Manjaro is also that it’s target is easy usage which attracts beginners. Now that isn’t bad per se (it was my first distro too, and I still run it on some machines. I’m not a hater) but it does become a thing when those people go to Arch-related spaces (like the Arch forum or the AUR comment section) asking Arch-people for help.
For one, Manjaro isn’t Arch. It may be based on it, but it also has it’s differences. It’s better to ask on the Manjaro forums. Why some Manjaro users go bother the Arch forums I never understood. The Manjaro forum is very helpful, quick to react, and more appropiate. No reason to divert really…
And secondary, Arch is a distro aimed at more advanced users and has a “know the basics, read the documentation, understand it, and try stuff yourself. And if you thén still don’t know you can ask” expectation. Since Manjaro attracts beginners, the questions they ask are often not only about a different distro, but on the level Arch expects you to be able to figure it out yourself making it rather a nuicance (after all, they’re asking beginner questions in a space for advanced users). Manjaro users doing that somewhat regularily gave it a bad reputation.
I’ve always felt that Manjaro holds an untenable position on the Arch derivative spectrum. It’s a weird mix of difficult (inherited from Arch) and fragile setup out of the box.
The best way to use it is to accept all the decisions that were put into that setup and not tinker with it… but that runs counter to everything that Arch stands for. So it keeps attracting exactly the wrong kind of user, who will tinker and get frustrated, and eventually break it, and then go around telling everybody that it sucks.
IMO it works well for two types of users:
- A person who’s desktop-savvy but not particularly Linux savvy, who doesn’t have root rights. Provided someone else handles stuff like the initial install, adding apps, and running the updates for them.
- Someone’s who’s an experienced Linux user and appreciates the “Archiness” but has grown tired of babysitting their daily driver distro and wants shit to “just work” for the most part. But can also fix it if something happens.
It’s a rather specific niche.
good point
Why some Manjaro users go bother the Arch forums I never understood
me neither
highlight the last time was a manjaro user asking me in the aur to help him with his manjaro issues on the package. fucking leechers
