The aur usually has what I need, only have had to manually build once… Before I found the aur package. Endeavoros is a good easy way to get into arch if you are worried about the manual configuration.
Alright, cool. Why not Manjaro? I did a quick Google search and saw people saying Manjaro is bloated in comparison to EndevorOS, are there other reasons as well?
Yeah, they like forgot to reupload a new cert 3 times.
And they hold packages back. EndeavourOS uses Arch’s repos directly, whereas Manjaro has it’s own repos. EndeavourOS is just Arch with a GUI installer and some handy prepicked choices, like a DE.
DNS at any company tends to be a mess. Multiply that by a thousand for a large multinational corporation. Case in point, here’s Microsoft (and these are never going to stop, due to the sheer complexity):
Even when you use an automated service things can go wrong. For example I use Let’s Encrypt but it needs to verify my DNS ownership so I use an API token to let the certbot make the modifications to prove that. At some point I wanted to restrict the token rights so it only has access to certain TXT records (to increase security in case the token every gets compromised). Long story short I forgot to include one wildcard and that particular certificate couldn’t get renewed so it was out for the day until I fixed it.
Manjaro’s website is made for presentation purposes and whether it’s up or not has no impact on how the distro runs or whether you can download packages. Furthermore it’s a completely different team from the distro developers so this has no bearing on the package quality. I’ve been a Manjaro user when some of the manjaro.org certificates expired but I never knew about it because it didn’t affect me in any way.
manjaro.org uses Let’s Encrypt now and it’s been recently redesigned.
There are three distros derived from Arch that try to do very different things:
Endeavour is Arch with a friendly installer. That’s it. It will install faster but then you’ll be using Arch, and that’s not a good idea for a beginner.
Garuda is also Arch but with a few more helpful tools and apps. Same reasoning as above.
Manjaro uses Arch packages as an upstream source (like Ubuntu vs Debian) but does things to them to make it stable. Which, unfortunately, makes a certain kind of Arch fan foam at the mouth and you’ve probably already been linked to “manjarno” and similar idiocy. So you’d have to deal with that.
But seriously, I have mixed feelings recommending Manjaro to a beginner. The distro itself is super-stable and easy to use because you basically have to do nothing. I have non-computer savvy family members on Manjaro without admin privileges and it works perfectly.
But the trick is that doing nothing part. You have to leave it alone and not modify the way it works, and beginners often feel the need to tinker with the system… Not only that but it’s hard as a beginner to figure out online what’s generic Arch advice and what’s Manjaro-specific and which of that can be applied safely on Manjaro and which is an Arch-ism that will ruin your install.
If you’re set on trying Manjaro I can offer a list of recommendations to give you an idea of how to navigate the dos and donts.
Just ignore “bloat” on principle. It’s a meaningless term and leads to much suffering.
Untold numbers of systems have been made unbootable, untold years of time wasted, trying to get rid of “bloat”.
The most “bloated” distro in the world is probably a default Slackware installation.
It installs every single package in its repo. Including several desktop environments and every single KDE program.
And it’s just 2/3 of the size of a Windows installation.
The aur usually has what I need, only have had to manually build once… Before I found the aur package. Endeavoros is a good easy way to get into arch if you are worried about the manual configuration.
Alright, cool. Why not Manjaro? I did a quick Google search and saw people saying Manjaro is bloated in comparison to EndevorOS, are there other reasons as well?
Yeah, they like forgot to reupload a new cert 3 times.
And they hold packages back. EndeavourOS uses Arch’s repos directly, whereas Manjaro has it’s own repos. EndeavourOS is just Arch with a GUI installer and some handy prepicked choices, like a DE.
Thanks!
It happens to everybody, including Microsoft, Google, Amazon etc.
Actually, most of them have automatic cert renewal… in fact, most web services have that nowadays.
DNS at any company tends to be a mess. Multiply that by a thousand for a large multinational corporation. Case in point, here’s Microsoft (and these are never going to stop, due to the sheer complexity):
Even when you use an automated service things can go wrong. For example I use Let’s Encrypt but it needs to verify my DNS ownership so I use an API token to let the certbot make the modifications to prove that. At some point I wanted to restrict the token rights so it only has access to certain TXT records (to increase security in case the token every gets compromised). Long story short I forgot to include one wildcard and that particular certificate couldn’t get renewed so it was out for the day until I fixed it.
Manjaro’s website is made for presentation purposes and whether it’s up or not has no impact on how the distro runs or whether you can download packages. Furthermore it’s a completely different team from the distro developers so this has no bearing on the package quality. I’ve been a Manjaro user when some of the manjaro.org certificates expired but I never knew about it because it didn’t affect me in any way.
manjaro.org uses Let’s Encrypt now and it’s been recently redesigned.
There are three distros derived from Arch that try to do very different things:
But seriously, I have mixed feelings recommending Manjaro to a beginner. The distro itself is super-stable and easy to use because you basically have to do nothing. I have non-computer savvy family members on Manjaro without admin privileges and it works perfectly.
But the trick is that doing nothing part. You have to leave it alone and not modify the way it works, and beginners often feel the need to tinker with the system… Not only that but it’s hard as a beginner to figure out online what’s generic Arch advice and what’s Manjaro-specific and which of that can be applied safely on Manjaro and which is an Arch-ism that will ruin your install.
If you’re set on trying Manjaro I can offer a list of recommendations to give you an idea of how to navigate the dos and donts.
Hasn’t been updated in a while, but still valid:
https://manjarno.pages.dev/
That thing hasn’t been “valid” in half a decade.
Just ignore “bloat” on principle. It’s a meaningless term and leads to much suffering.
Untold numbers of systems have been made unbootable, untold years of time wasted, trying to get rid of “bloat”.
The most “bloated” distro in the world is probably a default Slackware installation.
It installs every single package in its repo. Including several desktop environments and every single KDE program.
And it’s just 2/3 of the size of a Windows installation.