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.