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Comment by nixosbestos | Hacker News Reader

I will never, ever understand how Manjaro has the audience it has, including SBC manufacturers, etc. They don't work with the community particularly well, have a horrible, awful track record of distro stewardship.

And now this.

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I used to use vanilla Arch. I really liked it, didn't mind the install process, and was reasonably happy with package stability. But there were a couple times when Arch's bleeding edge rolling package releases caused issues for me. I tried Manjaro partly because they update packages after a bit more testing, and I've never had any issues like that with them. I'm ok with being a month or two behind Arch in exchange for more stability. Now I'm thinking of going back to Arch tho...

Installing Arch is unnecessarily difficult for most people. Manjaro is Arch without all the hassle. All the "cool" people seem to have switched to Manjaro's successor, EndeavourOS, though, which does the same thing but with a rebrand.

I've never had trouble with Manjaro because of anything Manjaro caused. The occasional error when updating because the AUR is ahead of the distro repo is never a problem. The worst problem I've ever caught them on was "forgetting to renew their HTTPS certificate that one time".

Manjaro has a tendency to fork and ship stuff that works well enough. They don't wait for the last two or three years in the long tail of development before general availability. That makes their software rather unstable on some platforms (mobile, Apple ARM) but on the other hand, their software is actually available, not just a tarball and a makefile.

The biggest issue Manjaro brings is the flood of users who don't know what they're talking about coming to forums like Arch Linux trying to solve their instability issues. Once Manjaro fully dies, those people will still exist, they'll just ask about "how to fix libxyz on endeavour" instead of "how to fix libxyz on manjaro".

It wasn't once, it was multiple times, and at least once, they recommended clock-rollback as a workaround.

installing arch is just partitioning a drive and pacstrapping

it is in NO way unnecessarily difficult

there's even an archinstall script for the lazy

just because there is no gui installer != unnecessarily difficult

The occasional error when updating from AUR because of Manjaro's arbitrarily updated system stack is absolutely a problem, as evidenced by the occasional error.

EndevourOS is not the same as Manjaro, it uses Arch's binary repositories directly. The answer to "how to fix libxyz on endeavour" is exactly the same as "how to fix libxyz on arch' which means that the Arch wiki, one of the best Linux rescources in general, directly applies. I straight up think Manjaro is a waste of time for everyone, it doesn't really do anything better and they've handled so many things so much worse.

Because Archinstall is scary, even if you could train an elementary-schooler to use it. Manjaro just repackages the same thing with a harder-to-use and more confusing GUI which people are more willing to give a spin.

Archinstall fckd up my EFI partition for dual-boot. Had to reinstall windows. It was probably my fault, but Manjaro just worked first time.

I first used Arch over ten years ago and nobody told me about archinstall until a few weeks ago! I was using Ubuntu out of laziness because I was tired of manually installing Arch every time I got a new machine (until now, I use Arch (again, btw)).

I wonder how many Manjaro users are like me, and just don't realize that Arch ships an installer now.

> I first used Arch over ten years ago and nobody told me about archinstall until a few weeks ago!

It wasn't really an official option ten years ago; https://archlinux.org/news/installation-medium-with-installe... puts it in 2021 (though that's just when it was added to official install media; I assume it was available in some capacity before that)

Isn't EndeavourOS quite a bit better? It's ranked higher on DistroWatch.com and its Visitor Rating is 8.48 compared to Manjaro's 8.07.

DistroWatch ratings are completely pointless and meaningless.

The rankings are but the ratings aren't.

> Manjaro just repackages the same thing with a harder-to-use and more confusing GUI which people are more willing to give a spin.

Lol, if it was harder to use people would use archinstall instead.

I disagree. Archinstall has better disk partitioning tools, more options and a more logical and clear setup menu. The reason people do not use it and prefer Manjaro instead is because it has a GUI, despite the fact that it is objectively a worse interface.

I say this as a former Arch/Manjaro user that had to reinstall his system every 2 months. Once you get over the "text on a screen is scary" phase it's immediately clear how Archinstall is a better installer. To be clear I consider neither OS suitable for daily driving with so many better alternatives out there, but Archinstall is feared by many for practically no reason.

Well maybe after decades of evidence developers will come to grips with the fact that, for most users, a GUI is always better than a text interface.

Or you can keep shouting into a void, your choice.

If you are a normal person, you should not be installing Arch Linux.

Manjaro doesn't change that by making it easier to install, it baits users in with AUR packages and inevitably disappoints them because it's breaks your system even more often than Homebrew does.

Better in what metric?

The problem with users, of pretty much anything, is that they're stupid. Even me! I am stupid. When I buy a car, I'm not so worried about the drive train or the complexity of the transmission or how viscous the oil it uses is. Because that I don't understand. Pretty colors, sharp lines, and a good price makes my decisions. But those are surface level.

GUIs may attract more users, perhaps that's a metric they're better in. That doesn't make them faster to use, or even easier to use! Users greatly skew towards familiarity, but typically familiarity in surface-level ways only.

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