Establishing a full DE on Arch is as simple as 'pacman -S plasma kde-applications sddm' followed by 'systemctl enable sddm.service'.
Compiling everything manually would take a long time. You would need to work out all the dependencies, make everything, install everything, create all the configuration files... You'd then need to do this again every time a package is updated. You'd hope that every dependency had an RSS feed you could follow. For those that didn't you'd need to regularly check for updates. Arch requires two commands...
I used ubuntu for years and decided to give Arch a try on my media pc. Was way easier than I expected as it now has an installer, archinstall. Honestly the whole arch elitism thing no longer makes sense.
Arch elitism doesn't really exist and never really has. People confuse "we aren't going to handhold you through the installation process if you can't be bothered reading the documentation" with elitism.
Worth noting that Manjaro has had a somewhat tarnished reputation, which has been widely covered before but it's still worth mentioning.[1]
I used to recommend Manjaro to people as an alternative to Arch that's a bit friendlier, but I stopped after trying to debug an issue and realizing that they have overcomplicated a lot of things (kernel management in particular bugs me in Manjaro.)
Arch now has some kind of installer, so I guess that's an improvement. Though, I really wish Valve could package something like SteamOS 3 for regular desktops. I'm aware of multiple projects that do similar things, but the execution on Deck is quite good. The "immutable" concept is certainly going to be an important part of Linux on desktops in the future, probably in different forms.
EndeavourOS is a (so far, time will tell) more reliable and sane normie-friendly desktop Arch with installer. The Budgie DE is def worth checking out for F&F.
Completely agreed. I’ve been using EndeavourOS for half a year now, and it’s great. It’s almost the same as vanilla Arch, just with more packages installed by default and a few UX improvements.
I switched from Manjaro to EndeavourOS last year after using Manjaro for two (Manjaro was my first experience with Linux as a daily driver) and agree with this fully. I much prefer using Arch's regular repositories to Manjaro's. But having used Manjaro as my first distribution (I shouldn't have been using an Arch-based distro, but that aside), I don't think EndeavourOS is a one-to-one normie replacement in all respects. While I don't need or want Manjaro's GUI tools now, Pamac and its GUI kernel/driver tools helped me make the adjustment from having only used Windows to Linux. I am sure I could have managed on EndeavourOS, but it would have been more difficult at the time.
The true replacement for casual users is Pop_OS. For more mid-tier users I’d recommend installing base Arch once, then wiping and installing OpenSUSE.
Using Arch without a bigger org managing it for you is kind of dangerous. Their policy is that they just wantonly push anything, and if there’s something wrong with a package they’ll tell you in the upgrade message. That you’ll have to manually evoke. And check for each package upgrade.
I learned a lot from setting up Arch a couple of times, but ultimately I think they have a few policies that are terrible for the average user or even company.
CachyOS is another great Arch distro worth checking out, being AVX2-optimized similar to Intel's Clear Linux or Gentoo, but otherwise basically being EndeavorOS.
Sadly the home Wiki page of CachyOS does not sell it well for me. I appreciate we're given more options for a filesystem on install but beyond that I'm not sure what's so different.
Special optimizations? How? Compile the world like Gentoo so as to use every single instruction of your CPU? Cool, I can actually stand behind that and install the OS because of it.
But what does "a hardened Linux kernel" mean?
I feel that that page expects you to know a lot about CachyOS already and I found myself impatiently closing the browser tab when I was about 50% in.
Basically they package many kernels with different schedulers, hardening and such to choose from. I believe hardened linux may even be a vanilla Arch kernel?
And its not like Gentoo, they run their own repos like Clear Linux or ALHP were everything is basically built for Haswell and up (and very soon AVX512 CPUs like rocket lake/zen4). But unlike Manjaro, the vanilla Arch repos are also used, and are the system target.
Other than that... Its more or less an Arch installer, like EndeavorOS. Perhaps that is why it doesn't need an introduction, because beyond some qol it is Arch Linux. Thats kinda the point.
I am tired of seeing this website linked everywhere. People are posting it like a Pavlovian reflex any time Manjaro is mentioned in order to cancel the distribution, even if the criticism is very mild in my eyes. It is merely fuel for the distro war, which is a big deterrent for newcomers.
Indeed, I am running NixOS on five different devices. It's quite a time and effort investment, but I feel like once NixOS "clicks" for you, it ruins most other operating systems, which just feel like they're missing something now. I still generally recommend Arch to people (although hearing what people are saying, I'll probably start recommending EndeavorOS instead) because I think most people are barely able to make the Linux commitment in ideal conditions, much less the NixOS commitment.
> It's quite a time and effort investment, but I feel like once NixOS "clicks" for you, it ruins most other operating systems, which just feel like they're missing something now.
I found this to be 100% correct. You feel like you won’t ever need to distro-hop again, right? Like this is the penultimate Linux distro? Right?
To be clear: 'penultimate' means 'next to last', whereas 'ultimate' means 'last'.
Since NixOS's rough edges can be quite rough, perhaps 'penultimate' may be more apt. (I mean, when NixOS works well, then it is amazing; but if you hit some use case where NixOS is difficult to use, then it requires more effort/understanding to get through).
I’m gonna start using NixOS as my daily driver in a short time, may I ask whether you can pinpoint me to that part which needs to click? Is it learning Nix/being able to write derivations? (also learning resources etc.)
I can't really fully encapsulate it in a comment really, but I can give you some advice:
1. Use flakes to set up your system and do work with. It sometimes feels underdocumented, but it's worth some headscratching imo.
2. Don't worry about putting everything in the base system. Stick to services (Tailscale, Syncthing, etc) and system/base desktop software. It's easy enough to use nix run, or Podman, or flatpak, or even AppImage to a degree.
3. Want to configure something declaratively? Before pulling out HomeManager or another user tool, consider configuring software at the system level. I do this for Zsh, SwayWM, etc. As a bonus, you can easily block off shell startup files and chown them to root so that malware can't trivially insert themselves there. (It's a weak protection, but definitely doesn't hurt in addition to other approaches.)
There's more (I recommend using Nix-ld to support AppImage and raw binaries better) but these things go a long way.
What clicks is that the OS seems to go against entropy, getting more stable the longer you use it and update your config, as opposed to other distros, which get cruftier over time, after which you have to reinstall every couple years, not remembering half the things you did to set it up. As others have said, it's immutable and completely built from config, and you can basically configure anything, so you can effectively redeploy a machine form config in minutes. Furthermore, it creates a snapshot every time you deploy, so you can always roll back if you break something.
Nix is basically the future of operating systems. The one problem that still needs solving, which is blocking wider adoption, is ease of use. People are working on making the command line tools easier, but what will really do it is something that abstracts away config generation with a UI installer and tools, but opens up the config if you go into "advanced mode" or something like that.
I'd strongly advice on using Nix in some other context (local dev environment for some or all your projects, for example) before jumping into NixOS as your daily driver, especially for a workstation where you work with dev.
Why not just use base Arch? It seems kind of silly to try anything else when the options are laid out very easily in front of you in the base installer.
I don't like to fiddle with my computer too much, I just installed arch with KDE using their installer and kind of forgot about it for many months and it just worked™ (until I broke it myself in a way any distro would have broken, but that's a different story).
The only thing with arch that is blocking a non-techy/fiddle-unfriendly person is the installation process (even with the script, knowing what a DE is, making a conscious decision which to choose, KDE etc)
"The only thing with arch that is blocking a non-techy/fiddle-unfriendly person is the installation process "
I think your definition of "non-techy/fiddle-unfriendly" is quite different from the rest of the population.
Also note, that just because you happened to had months of no problems, that does not mean it will be the same experience for someone else. Speaking of it: for a non-techy person, using the terminal is already a problem.
It used to be like that before, but now there's this archinstall script which works wonders. You can select what DE to install, extra packages, setup your locale, keyboard, etc. It's much easier than it was before.
As a young teenager I got the bright idea to get my mother using Linux. Later I bought her a Mac and she was much happier. Wish I'd thought of that sooner.
(I have no particular attachment to any OS (hate them all equally ;), it's mostly a matter of what you're used to, and picking the right tool for the job.)
They only make it out to be a big deal as they've let more important certs expire four other times. Though that certificate wasn't important, it shows they still haven't properly addressed one of their long term problems.
The problem with Arch is not with the installer. Installing it actually is pretty straightforward thanks to their Wiki (although it may seem intimidating to those who never actually tried reading it). The problem (also a key feature) is they apparently ship totally untested packages immediately as upstream releases (so updates often break something) while Manjaro does some reasonable testing and fitting (so updates almost never break anything) while still managing to ship reasonably fresh. Most of the the other distros ship ancient versions of everything. So to me Manjaro feels the golden point between radically fresh (Arch) and obsolete (others).
I used Arch in 2010-2012 (when I was very new to Linux yet had no problem installing Arch thanks to the Wiki) and something broke a number of times (maybe like 3 times a year). It also felt surprisingly slower than Ubuntu despite using XFCE vs Gnome2.
I then switched to Ubuntu and then to Manjaro and had only one break (it just wouldn't boot, but I easily found instructions on how to fix that) in many years straight.
I don't say Arch is bad but to me it seems like it is rather far from perfect while Manjaro is the closest to perfect I have ever seen.
Needless to say I appreciate Arch exists and am very grateful for the amazing job they do. Obviously no Manjaro would exist without Arch in the first place. Arch Wiki deserves a separate mention as it is of great quality and often helps a lot no matter what actual distro are you tweaking (it helped me with Ubuntu).
Funny thing I've found arch the rolling distro with the least breakages. I've tried (and liked) tumbleweed, sidux and others, but ended up with arch because it was just very stable.
This probably is true as long as you don't compare to Manjaro which does additional testing and fitting. I once (this was long ago, but after I have had used Arch already) tried the latest unstable Debian and found it so broken I just couldn't use it at all, let alone rely on it.
This isn't really true last I checked. They merely make their testing repo, what's effectively in line with normal arch release, available for 2 weeks then rely on someone telling them something is wrong in their forum. They don't do much, if any, testing themselves.
It really isn't hard for technical folks. I've done it maybe 4 times now (I am a chronic distrohopper). The guide is long because it covers a bunch of cases. By the 4th time round I was basically using the guide to remind myself how to use some commands that are rarely used outside of an installation (fdisk gets me every time).
It is worth doing at least once, it teaches you a lot about Linux.
I had good experience with manjaro. The main selling point for me was the rolling release. I got tired of reinstalling stuff as Ubuntu updates. There’s always an issue and you end up having to install from scratch. However, as long as Ubuntu is on its own partition, and your files are separated out, that reinstall isn’t so bad. I eventually wrote a todo list for it, and wrote some scripts to get set up faster
The one thing I don’t understand about this perspective is if you’re a person who feels comfortable running Arch, wouldn’t you be comfortable working through a bad package upgrade scenario?
Used it for like a year before switching to opensuse tumbleweed. For rolling release Ive found it to be a lot more stable, though some of more obscure packages I use are harder to obtain.
I really think that Arch is vastly preferable. Manjaro is highly oppinionated and does a lot of "weird" things. Having their own package repository, while offering the AUR isn't a great idea, neither is trying to ship a non-free office by default.
In my experience it is significantly less stable and using an Arch based distro without the basic knowledge of an Arch system seens like a recipe for frustration.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
I don't think they're interchangeable (I wouldn't recommend someone using Manjaro just switch to Arch if they're not either willing to learn or already knowledgeable), but specifically where stability is concerned -- anecdotally yes, I've had more issues to debug on Manjaro than on Arch.
I haven't tried EndeavourOS or any of the other Manjaro replacements, but next time that I need to set up a Linux computer quickly and don't have the patience to set up Arch, I probably will try one of them.
I will say in Manjaro's defense that even with some of its weirdness, I think I've had fewer issues on Manjaro than I have on Debian-based systems like Ubuntu. But I don't think that's a fair comparison because I haven't used Ubuntu in a while and I wasn't running it in parallel to Manjaro. So I suspect some of the increased stability has come from just general Linux progress and me knowing more about how to keep a computer stable.
What's really so "privacy" about Manjaro that something like Debian doesn't have? Of course Canonical has a really bad reputation on privacy with all the tricks they've been pulling but Ubuntu isn't the only game under the sun.
I've never used it but I know Manjaro is basically a more opinionated and easier to use Arch. If you want rolling debian isn't an option but something like OpenSUSE tumbleweed is.
But I really wonder what's supposed to be so much better in terms of privacy on Manjaro.
I'm not familiar with Manjaro, but with other security-focused distros, the difference is what the defaults are, plus perhaps some unique convenience applications.
There's nothing you can do with any of the security-oriented distros that you can't do with any other distro, but the security-oriented ones can ease initial configuration and perhaps make it less likely that you overlooked something.
Well, first of all, security is not the same as privacy though they do of course somewhat align.
Second, the defaults on something like Debian are very security focused. Out of the box it installs hardly anything.
Also I have never heard of Manjaro trying to be a "security-focused" distro until now. Not in the sense of OpenBSD, Whonix, or Hardened Gentoo. I'm sure it's not bad at privacy and security but really for most Linux distros this is a given.
Again, not talking about Manjaro as I know nothing about it, but while Debian is indeed reasonably secure out of the box, it is a far cry from being actually hardened (because a hardened system is less user-friendly). Security-oriented distros that I am familiar with are more hardened out of the box.
But, again, that's a state you can achieve with every distro. It's just with normal distros, it takes more work.
Manjaro isn't security oriented. Its a general purpose desktop distro that ships with a proprietary office suite by default. They also don't do anything to elaborate on the privacy claims in TFA. Disingenuous in my humble opinion, unless of course the privacy claim is in contrast to Windows. But then again the article doesn't elaborate
Sandboxing is the big one (think Qubes, although it is not exactly a Linux distro), as well as good security practices for the distro maintainers, good defaults for kernel configuration, timely updates, some kinda MAC.
Manjaro has little of this as a default out of the box. They are mostly able to claim that they are privacy oriented because any OS that isn't borderline spyware like Windows is privacy oriented in comparison.
Debian unstable is, in my experience, slightly more stable than arch. I gave up on arch after it broke after a pacman -Suy (despite having looked for breaking changes) one time too many.
Now I run Ubuntu LTS with gnu Guix for most userland software.
I've used Manjaro on a couple of installs, and have been quite happy with it.
The only gotcha I have come across happens if I do not upgrade any packages for a while and then try to install a new package, which can break dependencies for existing packages. The solution has been to do a system upgrade with `pacman -Syu`.
I have found arch (and by extension manjaro) to break a couple of times too many for my taste. Even without AUR.
I stopped using it and installed Debian stable or Ubuntu LTS together with gnu GUIX for userland stuff. I have survived dist-upgrades from LTS to LTS with fewer issues than what arch used to give me on a monthly basis.
I mean the headline is a bit odd no? Any Linux distro or FreeBSD install is privacy preserving if you disable any telemetry. Roll your own distro and have full control over what is installed and phones home. Something like Nix maybe.
PS: I wrote a fair bit of page, and most of the issues are what most people would consider minor. There are also mitigations available, opensnitch for example is great for network based privacy violations.
I used Manjaro for a while, because they had an i3 community edition and, well, I wanted to give i3 a go. I think it was DistroTube that convinced me to try it and, honestly, I loved it.
It’s a slippery slope, though. Manjaro is just a gateway drug to Arch, and Arch is just a psychiatric test to see how many things perpetually break on you before you snap and move onto the paradise of NixOS.
Yep. I went there. Of course I was going there. My username checks out.
This is also my story, though I added a two year sprint of using swaywm inbetween manjaro i3 and (in the next week) being 100% all-in on nixos at home.
You two are a step ahead of me. Been really enjoying Manjaro Sway edition the last couple years on a Framework laptop. I am in line for the AMD Frameworks and considering whether its arrival is the ideal moment to dive into NixOS. What do you think, am I too ambitious going that route with unvetted hardware?
It changed the way I use computers. Absolutely love it. Though I moved to Hyprland a few months ago and it's very similar, but for Wayland (and a slightly nicer look, but not without its own quirks).
Funnily enough, I moved to Hyprland when one of the Jupiter Broadcasting podcasts (Linux Unplugged possibly?) talked about it. So from this thread alone you can tell that I'm quite easily influenced!
Why do you want to stay within the .deb ecosystem?
The difference between .deb and other common packages (rpm, pacman) are minimal. Almost all desktop distros will handle dockerfiles just as well as Ubuntu.
I'm fairly satisfied with it, honestly. It's prevalent and 'standard' enough. People run Ubuntu/Debian more than .rpm based systems I guess. I'm just trying to stay as near as my Docker deploy targets as I can.
I've been trying out Linux distros since the late 90s. I recognize Mint's reputation as a Windows alternative for Linux noobs. But it's honestly the best OS I've used on any platform since... Snow Leopard? With Cinnamon anyway (the default), it's polished, fast, and has a perfect set of default apps for what I need to do.
I switched from Ubuntu too and it was surprising how polished ZorinOS was. Everything was super stable and in the last 2 years, it didn't break by itself, which I can't say the same for Ubuntu sadly.
Linux Mint too is cool but the outdated UI is the only deal breaker for me.
Mint Cinnamon has been so good to me as a daily driver since I left Windows when Win8 came along. My older watercooled i7-7770 mini-ITX 1060 GTS has been chugging along on 19.03 LTS for years, and I've adopted a complete ecosystem of Linux tools for everything from development to photo/video editing to gaming due to its stability.
Recently picked up a Dell XPS15 with a new i7 and nVidia 3050 and the latest release worked with everything out of the box.
I would prefer rolling release to avoid the situation I'm in with LTS, but otherwise I'm a very happy Mint user and financial contributor.
But I'm pretty happy with OpenSuse for desktop use and MicroOS for my servers.
tough if I'm honest,
I don't know what are their main advantages over other systems.
I wished distributions would include an application firewall by default. This is something that should be prioritized in my opinion. Also, I would like to see some sort of permission management per application, like you have it on mobile operating systems like Android and ios.
For permission management you want all your apps from outside the distro (like Flathub), or you can manually use bubblewrap or firejail to create custom sandboxes.
I mean something else. An application firewall is something like opensnitch where you can block processes from communicating with specific external domains/ips.
IMO Fedora is the real flagship of Linux. It’s as modern as it can be without sacrificing stability, has strong corporate support, and rpms are usually the only packages other than debs and snaps that get official support from proprietary software vendors
It is worth knowing that arch actually has an installer on the default ISO these days, although I admit it is not fantastic and not super noob friendly. That said, it isn't much harder than the Debian non-graphical installer.
I know a lot of people hate Manjaro but it's one of the very few distros with sane defaults. I can't stand vanilla gnome, it's too anti-UX for me with all the missing features so Manjaro makes it more usable OOTB, just like ZorinOS.
It's been pretty stable for me, so I don't have any complaints.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 266 ms ] threadI've done all three. Arch isn't on the same level as Ubuntu, Fedora, or Manjaro on level of ease for instillation.
Compiling everything manually would take a long time. You would need to work out all the dependencies, make everything, install everything, create all the configuration files... You'd then need to do this again every time a package is updated. You'd hope that every dependency had an RSS feed you could follow. For those that didn't you'd need to regularly check for updates. Arch requires two commands...
I used to recommend Manjaro to people as an alternative to Arch that's a bit friendlier, but I stopped after trying to debug an issue and realizing that they have overcomplicated a lot of things (kernel management in particular bugs me in Manjaro.)
Arch now has some kind of installer, so I guess that's an improvement. Though, I really wish Valve could package something like SteamOS 3 for regular desktops. I'm aware of multiple projects that do similar things, but the execution on Deck is quite good. The "immutable" concept is certainly going to be an important part of Linux on desktops in the future, probably in different forms.
[1]: https://manjarno.snorlax.sh/
Using Arch without a bigger org managing it for you is kind of dangerous. Their policy is that they just wantonly push anything, and if there’s something wrong with a package they’ll tell you in the upgrade message. That you’ll have to manually evoke. And check for each package upgrade.
I learned a lot from setting up Arch a couple of times, but ultimately I think they have a few policies that are terrible for the average user or even company.
I work in Deep Learning, and the NVIDIA version comes in really handy.
I never face NVIDIA issues like my peers frequently complain.
Special optimizations? How? Compile the world like Gentoo so as to use every single instruction of your CPU? Cool, I can actually stand behind that and install the OS because of it.
But what does "a hardened Linux kernel" mean?
I feel that that page expects you to know a lot about CachyOS already and I found myself impatiently closing the browser tab when I was about 50% in.
Are there better introduction articles?
https://wiki.cachyos.org/
https://github.com/CachyOS
Basically they package many kernels with different schedulers, hardening and such to choose from. I believe hardened linux may even be a vanilla Arch kernel?
And its not like Gentoo, they run their own repos like Clear Linux or ALHP were everything is basically built for Haswell and up (and very soon AVX512 CPUs like rocket lake/zen4). But unlike Manjaro, the vanilla Arch repos are also used, and are the system target.
Other than that... Its more or less an Arch installer, like EndeavorOS. Perhaps that is why it doesn't need an introduction, because beyond some qol it is Arch Linux. Thats kinda the point.
Which is both good, and actually sane.
NixOS: Exists. (And runs great after I moved from Arch 1.5 years ago!)
I found this to be 100% correct. You feel like you won’t ever need to distro-hop again, right? Like this is the penultimate Linux distro? Right?
Since NixOS's rough edges can be quite rough, perhaps 'penultimate' may be more apt. (I mean, when NixOS works well, then it is amazing; but if you hit some use case where NixOS is difficult to use, then it requires more effort/understanding to get through).
1. Use flakes to set up your system and do work with. It sometimes feels underdocumented, but it's worth some headscratching imo.
2. Don't worry about putting everything in the base system. Stick to services (Tailscale, Syncthing, etc) and system/base desktop software. It's easy enough to use nix run, or Podman, or flatpak, or even AppImage to a degree.
3. Want to configure something declaratively? Before pulling out HomeManager or another user tool, consider configuring software at the system level. I do this for Zsh, SwayWM, etc. As a bonus, you can easily block off shell startup files and chown them to root so that malware can't trivially insert themselves there. (It's a weak protection, but definitely doesn't hurt in addition to other approaches.)
There's more (I recommend using Nix-ld to support AppImage and raw binaries better) but these things go a long way.
Nix is basically the future of operating systems. The one problem that still needs solving, which is blocking wider adoption, is ease of use. People are working on making the command line tools easier, but what will really do it is something that abstracts away config generation with a UI installer and tools, but opens up the config if you go into "advanced mode" or something like that.
Helps to get some intuition on what fits where.
Surely, hammer is fast enough to render retro indie games at 60fps. :-)
I don't want to babysit my computers. My wife would also not be amused
The only thing with arch that is blocking a non-techy/fiddle-unfriendly person is the installation process (even with the script, knowing what a DE is, making a conscious decision which to choose, KDE etc)
I think your definition of "non-techy/fiddle-unfriendly" is quite different from the rest of the population.
Also note, that just because you happened to had months of no problems, that does not mean it will be the same experience for someone else. Speaking of it: for a non-techy person, using the terminal is already a problem.
What OS is she using now?
As a young teenager I got the bright idea to get my mother using Linux. Later I bought her a Mac and she was much happier. Wish I'd thought of that sooner.
(I have no particular attachment to any OS (hate them all equally ;), it's mostly a matter of what you're used to, and picking the right tool for the job.)
Approx how many times have you observed this in practice over, say, the past 2~5 years?
I then switched to Ubuntu and then to Manjaro and had only one break (it just wouldn't boot, but I easily found instructions on how to fix that) in many years straight.
I don't say Arch is bad but to me it seems like it is rather far from perfect while Manjaro is the closest to perfect I have ever seen.
Needless to say I appreciate Arch exists and am very grateful for the amazing job they do. Obviously no Manjaro would exist without Arch in the first place. Arch Wiki deserves a separate mention as it is of great quality and often helps a lot no matter what actual distro are you tweaking (it helped me with Ubuntu).
I found reading the installation guide intimidating!
It is worth doing at least once, it teaches you a lot about Linux.
Switched from Ubuntu to Manjaro a year ago as Ubuntu updates kept on breaking everything: drivers, issues with Python.
I also quite like the pieces of software that ship with Manjaro. Especially Kate, which I'm now using on my Windows devices as well.
I 've been happy with Arch for years though, but had to try another distro due to a certain large piece of software not working very well there.
Let's see...
If so, maybe they should set up a referral link to direct folks to the right place and collect a referral bonus to help fund Manjaro <- sorta joke.
In my experience it is significantly less stable and using an Arch based distro without the basic knowledge of an Arch system seens like a recipe for frustration.
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 met Arch users that are all 1337 and think they are the best. Usually they don't actually know much about their system at all.
And others that are like you say... Helpful but a bit protective.
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.
What will EndeavourOS do better?
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.
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. :|
- 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.
Thanks for entertaining the discussion.
EDIT: Also, supposedly, Manjaro team has some management issues.
I mean, just don't use them?
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.
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?
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.
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.
The deepest I’ve had to go is search the forum if I couldn’t figure out something from the wiki.
The wiki is so good that it’s common to come across it and find your answer for your linux question even if you are using a distro other than arch.
Eventually someone joined the community who did want to maintain an installer, so now they have archinstall.
To be honest I think most people are better served with other distros, because they tend to deliver them the experience they actually want.
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.
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.
Nerd arrogance at its best
Maybe there are better than Manjaro arch based starter distros, but for getting someone into Linux, my experience with Manjaro was great.
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 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.
A distro like Manjaro that delays package updates for a few weeks seems preferable for me.
It is actually worse, especially if you are using AUR packages.
But to be honest Arch has been extremely stable for me.
I haven't tried EndeavourOS or any of the other Manjaro replacements, but next time that I need to set up a Linux computer quickly and don't have the patience to set up Arch, I probably will try one of them.
I will say in Manjaro's defense that even with some of its weirdness, I think I've had fewer issues on Manjaro than I have on Debian-based systems like Ubuntu. But I don't think that's a fair comparison because I haven't used Ubuntu in a while and I wasn't running it in parallel to Manjaro. So I suspect some of the increased stability has come from just general Linux progress and me knowing more about how to keep a computer stable.
I've never used it but I know Manjaro is basically a more opinionated and easier to use Arch. If you want rolling debian isn't an option but something like OpenSUSE tumbleweed is.
But I really wonder what's supposed to be so much better in terms of privacy on Manjaro.
There's nothing you can do with any of the security-oriented distros that you can't do with any other distro, but the security-oriented ones can ease initial configuration and perhaps make it less likely that you overlooked something.
Second, the defaults on something like Debian are very security focused. Out of the box it installs hardly anything.
Also I have never heard of Manjaro trying to be a "security-focused" distro until now. Not in the sense of OpenBSD, Whonix, or Hardened Gentoo. I'm sure it's not bad at privacy and security but really for most Linux distros this is a given.
But, again, that's a state you can achieve with every distro. It's just with normal distros, it takes more work.
Manjaro has little of this as a default out of the box. They are mostly able to claim that they are privacy oriented because any OS that isn't borderline spyware like Windows is privacy oriented in comparison.
There are various sandboxing tools but they are developed upstream, not by distros.
> as well as good security practices for the distro maintainers
Some large distributions do this, but it takes a lot of work. How many contributors does Manjaro have?
I've been on Debian unstable for years on multiple devices, without major issues.
Now I run Ubuntu LTS with gnu Guix for most userland software.
https://wiki.debian.org/PrivacyIssues
The only gotcha I have come across happens if I do not upgrade any packages for a while and then try to install a new package, which can break dependencies for existing packages. The solution has been to do a system upgrade with `pacman -Syu`.
This is how any rolling release distro works. Manjaro is not different here.
I stopped using it and installed Debian stable or Ubuntu LTS together with gnu GUIX for userland stuff. I have survived dist-upgrades from LTS to LTS with fewer issues than what arch used to give me on a monthly basis.
https://wiki.debian.org/PrivacyIssues
It’s a slippery slope, though. Manjaro is just a gateway drug to Arch, and Arch is just a psychiatric test to see how many things perpetually break on you before you snap and move onto the paradise of NixOS.
Yep. I went there. Of course I was going there. My username checks out.
https://nixos.org/download.html#nixos-iso
Give it a shot!
Funnily enough, I moved to Hyprland when one of the Jupiter Broadcasting podcasts (Linux Unplugged possibly?) talked about it. So from this thread alone you can tell that I'm quite easily influenced!
https://boilingsteam.com/manjaro-is-losing-ground-very-fast-...
What are you guys using these days? Is Linux Mint any good?
The difference between .deb and other common packages (rpm, pacman) are minimal. Almost all desktop distros will handle dockerfiles just as well as Ubuntu.
I want to run away from `snap` tho.
I switched from Ubuntu too and it was surprising how polished ZorinOS was. Everything was super stable and in the last 2 years, it didn't break by itself, which I can't say the same for Ubuntu sadly.
Linux Mint too is cool but the outdated UI is the only deal breaker for me.
[0] - https://zorin.com/os
Recently picked up a Dell XPS15 with a new i7 and nVidia 3050 and the latest release worked with everything out of the box.
I would prefer rolling release to avoid the situation I'm in with LTS, but otherwise I'm a very happy Mint user and financial contributor.
But I'm pretty happy with OpenSuse for desktop use and MicroOS for my servers. tough if I'm honest, I don't know what are their main advantages over other systems.
There's nothing about Manjaro that makes it significantly more free than the other top Linux distributions (as an aggregate).
There's nothing about Manjaro that makes it significantly more open source than the other top Linux distributions (as an aggregate).
There's nothing about Manjaro that makes it significantly more private than the other top Linux distributions (as an aggregate).
https://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/OpenSnitch_available...
For permission management you want all your apps from outside the distro (like Flathub), or you can manually use bubblewrap or firejail to create custom sandboxes.
[0] https://safing.io/portmaster
[1] https://software.manjaro.org/package/portmaster-stub
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Archinstall
It's been pretty stable for me, so I don't have any complaints.