stolen from linux memes at Deltachat
this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2023
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It's awful for most new users, though. They don't even know what the options are, how can they choose anything?
Not every new user is the same but if they are absolute newbies they should start with a user friendly distro, which Arch definitely isn't.
I fully agree that it's bad for users who aren't that tech-savvy, but I meant it in a more general sense - during my time on Lemmy I've seen a ton of posts bashing arch and commenters pretty much calling it a "good for nothing distro", with the only more hated distro being Manjaro.
I love Manjaro :'(
It's like arch except it doesn't break all the time. And it has a great hardware and kernel utility, and still has access to the AUR. And I like pacman a lot better than apt.
From my experience (2 years Manjaro, 3 years Arch) it's the other way round. Manjaro presented me with a terminal way to often after Nvidia updates. Never had that on Arch. Especially the Nvidia updates are very reliable. I don't know what people do with their Arch installations. Mines rock-solid for the 3 years now. Possibly the most stable distro I ever used.
But I understand that you just can't advise newbies to install Arch, even when archinstall is relatively easy to use. Maybe EndeavourOS which brings a lot of convenience features and a graphical installer to the table. A fellow linux newb is running it without problems for a year now.
I've been on Manjaro for about 10 years now, and these days (last few years) nvidia-dependency-conflicts-caused-by-eol-kernel is the only real issue you can run into unprompted. Even that kind of requires you to have at least a couple year old installation (for the kernel to go EOL), which means newbie shouldn't ever be running into it. Not sure what Arch is doing these days, but when I was running it there was certain expectation of vigilance (reading Arch Linux News before updating) and readiness to fix issues caused by updates yourself. On Manjaro such major breaking updates are never sent to users on the stock stable branch, meaning you can practically run "pacman -Syu --noconfirm" willynilly.
I still wouldn't recommend it as the first distro as it doesn't hide the underlying complexity as well as something super mainstream like Ubuntu, but Arch/EndeavourOS is obviously much worse in that regard.
It's been nearly 4 years since I last used Manjaro and I had that error quite often around ever ½-¼ a year in my 2 years of Manjaro. iirc to resolve it I had to uninstall the current nvidia driver > restart without driver > install supported kernel > install driver. Don't know what I did wrong tho.
Manjaro did otherwise a good job to keep the sys together.
What bugged me a bit was the painfully long retention of the big KDE updates. At that time KDE was making big QOL leaps and quite a few distros had those updates already. But I could also live with that.
In the last month of my time with Manjaro a few Proton games dropped frames heavily and that's the end of the story. Made the switch to Arch and never had probs with nvidia again, apart from when new Steam UI came out.
Manjaro can be a real pain depending on your hardware setup. They make a lot of choices that are difficult to work around when you need to (for better or worse) which kinda defeats the whole point of arch (to not be opinionated)
I have the same setup of packages on a few computers. 0 issues on one, plagued with boot issues on another. And unfortunately, the attitude of the devs and forum is that if you have boot issues its obviously your fault.
It was definitely a good first arch distro for me, but pacman, aur, and everything else work just as great on Endeavour and all my devices are far more stable than when they were on Manjaro.
I think even if you’re tech-savvy you can have issues with Arch tbh. I don’t think the distro is without merit — a minimal rolling release binary distribution is clearly something people want… But I’m not sure Arch does a great job of being that (for me, at least), and I’ve personally found pacman and the official packages to be kind of lacking (keyring update issue that they’ve maybe finally fixed, installing specific versions of packages / pinning specific versions / downgrading packages are either not supported or not well supported, immediately removing kernel modules on upgrade, even if the currently running kernel may need them, etc…). It just doesn’t feel very polished in my experience and for my use cases (clearly it works for some people!), and that’s what has driven me away from Arch personally. I think a lot of this stems from Arch’s philosophy of being aggressively minimal, which is maybe fair enough… but I don’t think it’s for everybody.
All distros have their little hate-clubs. Try being an Ubuntu user! Or Debian ("why are all the packages so old!"), or Fedora ("ew, Red Hat"), or Gentoo ("is that a laptop or a space heater?") or...er, openSUSE (now I come to think of it, does anybody actually hate SUSE?). You get the idea, anyway. People get super weird and fanboyish about distros.
I don't think arch has it any worse than the rest.
Manjaro takes away the only reason i use arch. Almost no pre installed software except what you need to get things running.