There’s No Reason to Run Manjaro

I realize this post may come off as rather negative, but I do want to make it clear that I don’t harbor some sort of hate for Manjaro. That said, I also didn’t write this post just for the sake of mindlessly bashing a specific Linux distro. If Manjaro had none of the issues I describe here, I would have little issue recommending it. Regardless, if Manjaro works just fine for you, this is not a personal attack on you.

After a stint of using Ubuntu from 2008 to 2010, I largely went back to using Windows (and occasionally macOS). However, there were times where I did become curious about Linux. How was it doing over the years? I thought about Linux here and there over those years, though I didn’t want to just default to Ubuntu again.

Somewhere along the way, I got my hands on an old laptop around 2016, and a few people I knew recommended Manjaro to breathe some new life into it, especially since I was still trying to avoid simply picking Ubuntu.

I would throw Manjaro onto the system, but the same things always happened.

1. I’d be impressed initially, especially with its default theme and appearance.
2. Eventually, one thing or another would happen to the installation.
3. Not knowing how to fix it would make me think that Windows wasn’t so bad, and I would just go back to using it.

Fast forward to the lockdown in 2020. Like many others, I was at home with an abundance of time on my hands. I decided to install Arch from scratch and had nothing but smooth sailing from there. In fact, I fell in love with how it felt to build my own ideal system. It seemed to me that the installation was the hardest part and that everything that came afterward was easy.

Why, I wondered, was my experience on Manjaro so off-putting compared to using vanilla Arch? It’s not like I want to hate Manjaro or something, but why was it so different?

I thought about it again as of late and have also noticed that the Linux community has generally become more hostile towards Manjaro over time. While Manjaro was once a quick recommendation anybody gave for new Linux users a few years ago, that’s not the case anymore. Manjaro’s reputation now is polarizing at best and maligned at worst.

But why exactly? Why was this the case for a distro that so many other Linux users once championed almost unanimously aside from a small handful of users? What happened?

Stability and Being Marketed for New Users

Manjaro was always advertised as a user-friendly distro for new users. I can almost see it, as the prospect of installing Arch Linux used to be more intimidating.

However, the user-friendly veneer put me off troubleshooting the system or getting things working again whenever I had to inevitably fix something. People kept saying it was easy to use, I would think, so why would I need to work so hard to fix something when it broke? Arch is superb on its own for giving such fine control and options to its users, but Manjaro hides a lot of the process in the name of simplification. Consequently, when something broke on Manjaro, I had little idea what to start doing. It was this detail several years back that always led to me crawling back to Windows instead of persisting and solving my issues.

Another example deals with how I tried to help a friend switch from Windows to Linux last year when he ran into some issues with Windows 10. Knowing that Manjaro wasn’t really for me and that it was advertised as being user-friendly for beginners, I threw its ISO onto my Ventoy USB stick along with six or seven other distros. I wanted to bring a reasonable selection of distros in case said friend didn’t like just one distro. After all, if people kept recommending Manjaro to new users, maybe my friend would enjoy it as a newcomer to Linux?

After booting each live environment, my friend was most impressed with Pop!_OS and settled happily on that distro. Why do I mention this at all? Out of all the distros we tested on his hardware, Manjaro was the only one that would either fail to boot entirely or came with bizarre graphical and responsiveness issues (we tried more than once; once with and once without the Nvidia drivers). That was just in the live environment, not a full-blown installation. Even my friend commented on how Manjaro looked the least impressive out of all the options he saw.

Sure, I suppose my friend could have installed Manjaro and troubleshot the issues, but how can someone reasonably expect to troubleshoot or fix something if they aren’t shown all of the moving parts? They won’t understand how one aspect of the system works with another. Granted, I don’t have perfect knowledge of Linux (far from it, in fact), but I have learned a lot more compared to 13 to 15 years ago. I do, however, largely thank the time I spent getting my Arch installations working. Even after I ran archinstall on my most recent setup, I still have a good idea what’s going on with my Arch machine.

Of course, many have pointed out how Arch Linux is a bleeding edge distro that puts out whatever package as soon as it’s new. While that’s not always true about Arch (Fedora and Ubuntu both got GNOME 44 a good while before Arch did), Manjaro purposely holds back packages for a few weeks at a time. They claim this is just so they can be sure everything works without breaking the tweaked Manjaro system post-update, but that does defeat the purpose somewhat of running the latest and greatest. Many argue that this is a major strike against Manjaro in general, making it an Arch-like rather than a truly Arch-based distro. Their maintenance team claims, of course, that updates are held back for stability’s sake, which brings up another issue I have with the distro.

Pamac is Trash

I’m not a big fan of GUI updaters, and I had such a negative perception of them after using Pamac (not to be confused with pacman, the package manager for Arch).

Pamac is a GUI update program as well as an AUR helper that comes bundled with your Manjaro installation. The Manjaro team even uses AUR support as a selling point. With the AUR, you can get more access to software you would otherwise be unable to obtain elsewhere. Seems cool. What’s not to love?

While I am a big fan of the AUR, this goes with the issue I mentioned regarding how Manjaro holds packages back. To put this in perspective, let’s just say that I want to install AUR-Package1 from the AUR. It may be a popular program that most people can easily run on Windows or macOS, and this is the easiest way to get it on an Arch-based system.

Still with me? Good, now keep in mind the AUR is maintained by the Arch Linux team, not the Manjaro team. Rather, the Manjaro community only gets the privilege of accessing it.

The reason I mention this is because AUR packages typically need dependencies in the Arch repositories, and Arch typically has the latest packages. Let’s say for me to correctly install AUR-Package1, I’ll need DependencyPkg-5.5 installed first. If I’m installing this on Arch, everything’s fine.

But what if I’m doing this on Manjaro? I may need DependencyPkg-5.5 to install AUR-Package1 from the AUR, but remember: the Manjaro team holds back packages for a few weeks. I may be stuck with an older version like DependencyPkg-5.4 or older. The main point is the dependencies needed aren’t updated, so the odds of something breaking due to a mismatched dependency rise. Sure, I could set up Manjaro to download packages from the Manjaro Unstable repos to get around this, but those are just the vanilla Arch packages.

Going back to Pamac, its interactivity with the AUR is something I hated back in the day and I still have a disdain for even now. Since nobody brought things to my perspective when I first used Pamac as an AUR helper, I had countless issues with it.

I had endless problems importing GPG keys with it, I struggled to deal with compiling processes just not working, I didn’t really know what packages I could trust as fully-working or just broken, and I even recalled on more than one occasion seeing my whole system break when I tried many suggested fixes on endless Google searches.

While I don’t think Manjaro itself is worthy of hate, I can’t say the same for Pamac on its own. I loathe how useless Pamac is. I just feel it makes a thousand times more sense to update in a terminal. At least there I can understand why something goes wrong when I get an error output in the terminal.

I get that other GUI programs for installing and updating aren’t inherently bad. I liked using Synaptic back in my Ubuntu days, and I initially liked using Octopi when I first had Arch Linux running in 2020 (I went all-in on KDE), but my weariness of Pamac hasn’t gone away.

As the cherry on top, Pamac came under more fire in the past few years as it inadvertently sent massive amounts of traffic to the AUR servers due to a bug, which caused the AUR to go down. I’m certain I’m not the only person with a bone to pick with Pamac these days.

If I ever need to run Manjaro one day for whatever reason (I’m still not sure why I would), I know the very first thing I would do: surgically remove Pamac and never look back.

Partial Upgrades and General pacman Misuse

Okay, to hell with Pamac. Let’s say we just want to use the terminal. That’s already a step in the right direction. Since Manjaro is derived from Arch, we can at least use pacman commands with it!

If you’ve used Arch for a while, you likely know how to use pacman in a terminal.

# to run an update on Arch
sudo pacman -Syu

# to install a package on Arch
sudo pacman -S firefox

-Syu for updating the system and -S for installing packages. Seems simple, right?

For some strange reason, I would recall seeing various Manjaro users on their forums or other places online over the years recommend doing this:

# to run an update on Manjaro
sudo pacman -Syyu

# to install a package on Manjaro
sudo pacman -Sy firefox

At least they’re not using Pamac, I guess? Still, I don’t get why this is (or ever was) a thing with Manjaro, as the former is inefficient at best. Using -Syyu, -Syuu, or -Syyuu doesn’t really do users any favors. -Syyu is used to force a repo to update a second time and force an upgrade. It only really makes sense to use it if your database of installed packages experiences some kind of corruption issue or perhaps if your system is insanely out of date. Other than that, it only puts extra strain on mirrors.

-Syuu forces packages to synchronize with the repo, which could lead to an inadvertent downgrade on select packages. Then -Syyuu, if anybody actually used it, looks like the worst of both worlds.

It is also never recommended to ever install packages using -Sy, as that can force a partial upgrade. Arch Linux’s website, wiki, and forums all stress it as gospel: Partial upgrades are not supported. I recalled reading a few years ago about someone who tried to reinstall Firefox with sudo pacman -S firefox, but ran into issues when it didn’t work. Instead of troubleshooting the issue a different way, they went the Manjaro way of using sudo pacman -Sy firefox and it worked. Said user was happy for a short while. On the next reboot, however, Firefox refused to start entirely. (On another note, if anybody can find where I originally read this, I would greatly appreciate the link to it. I’ve been searching for it on DuckDuckGo to no avail so far, but I know I read it somewhere a good while back.)

Speaking of searching online, I will give credit for one thing. It seems more Manjaro users advise against installing packages with sudo pacman -Sy these days. I found a Manjaro forum post from 2021 advising people to avoid doing so, so good on them. It is worth noting, however, that the old Manjaro forums were shut down and replaced with the current ones, which might be part of why I don’t see so many users recommending -Sy installs anymore.

Fake Distrowatch Score

I still don’t get why this ever happened, but Manjaro was well-known for a while for using bots to fake their score on Distrowatch. Granted, they aren’t as egregious about it as MX Linux, but I do remember seeing Manjaro almost always in the top five.

Not much more to say on that other than how a Distrowatch rank doesn’t really indicate a whole lot as to how many people are running the distro, but how many people are viewing the page.

SoftMaker FreeOffice Controversy

Manjaro angered many users a few years back when they announced the decision to remove LibreOffice from default installations in favor of SoftMaker FreeOffice.

The biggest and most obvious issue with this dealt with how FreeOffice is considered proprietary software. There was a loud and immediate backlash from open-source software advocates, and understandably so. Manjaro’s team backpedaled by adding an option in the installer to choose between FreeOffice or LibreOffice.

But you know what? I actually didn’t have an issue with this one back when it happened. I even tried out FreeOffice on my Arch system in 2020 out of sheer curiosity. It turns out I actually liked FreeOffice! I knew it was proprietary, sure, but I was digging the interface and usability. It seemed like Manjaro’s team had done something right…

Until I realized several features were behind a paywall. I had to pay money to unlock more functionality. Look, I know developers need money and all, but considering the software is called FreeOffice, that left an extremely negative impression on me, so I removed it soon after and went right back to LibreOffice, the better choice.

Better Choices Exist

Manjaro first came at a time when there was no easier or consistently reliable way to install an Arch-like system. The only other notable distro that offered anything similar at the time was Antergos, but that was discontinued, leaving Manjaro as the only “easy” option. Manjaro always came off as the Ubuntu to Arch’s Debian, and despite all of Manjaro’s shortcomings, people generally dealt with them.

But now? Alternatives exist to cover any other use case for someone who wants to get an Arch-based system running.

• EndeavourOS is the option to install Arch easily with vanilla packages using a GUI. No holding packages back to see if they’re going to work first. It also tries to be user-friendly while simultaneously helping its users transition into becoming terminal-proficient. If I ever want to recommend a new user Arch, I would start them with this distro.
• Arco Linux is an option to install Arch as well as learn more about the inner-workings of Linux as a whole. Their website and companion YouTube channel also list countless tutorials and useful documentation to help users really learn more about the inner-workings of Arch. They also have various spins that are either “full” installs or lightweight setups to satisfy any power user’s needs.
• ArchLabs is a minimalist, Arch-based distro inspired directly by BunsenLabs, which itself is a minimalist, Debian-based distro inspired by the defunct CrunchBang Linux. This one has more of a moderate to advanced feel to it, which makes it great for experienced users who want a lightweight Arch-based distro with a window manager out of the gate.
• Artix Linux provides an Arch Linux experience with one big difference: no systemd. Spins come with a full desktop environment of choice to get up and running in a minutes.
• Archcraft Linux lets users install a graphically impressive and stunning Arch desktop from the get go. This one is definitely for fans of eye candy.
• And of course, vanilla Arch Linux itself! There’s always the option of running archinstall instead of doing things the traditional way like the Arch Wiki describes, so this is also easier than ever.

There are other options I haven’t even mentioned, as there are more Arch-based distros out there now than ever, but the point is Manjaro’s advantages are nullified by the advantages other distros offer. What does Manjaro have left to offer? I suppose it ships with a rather nice, complete theme if you’re a big fan of green. I’m even willing to admit that I do dig how it looks sometimes. Even so, you can get those same icons, themes, folders, and wallpapers installed easily on any of the above distros. No holding back updates, no confusing decisions, no broken AUR packages, nobody recommending sudo pacman -Sy firefox, and certainly no Pamac.

If you’re still somebody looking for a more user-friendly distro in general, perhaps something based on Ubuntu or Debian would make more sense. There’s Linux Mint, Pop!_OS, and Peppermint OS just off the top of my head. Even the release of Ubuntu on 23.04 Lunar Lobster is pretty compelling this time around. For something that is based on neither Arch nor Ubuntu, you certainly can’t go wrong with Fedora. Lastly, if you’re a more advanced user who wants a rolling-release model that isn’t just another Arch derivative, I’ve actually found myself liking openSUSE Tumbleweed a lot more on my recent attempts to use it on my Lenovo ThinkPad.

There’s More?

I could go on with a few other missteps the Manjaro team has made as a group. For instance, I could talk about the SSL certificate expiration mishap they made… five separate times. Once is bad enough, especially for tech-savvy developers maintaining a Linux distribution, but five times?

They even had a few workarounds for Manjaro users to set their clocks to the incorrect time to circumvent update issues in the past, which is mind-boggling. Manjaro has evolved into a full-scale company instead of a small community effort, so you should expect these guys to do better than that.

I could even talk about how they tried to make their own Manjaro spin for M1 Apple Silicon systems… only to ship it with an unstable and broken kernel from Asahi Linux without asking the Asahi Linux team first, which made Asahi look broken and incomplete. However, I think I’ve made my point on this.

While Manjaro isn’t the worst distro in the world or worthy of hatred, it does have less and less of a compelling reason to exist. The mistakes of the Manjaro team certainly don’t help matters. While I don’t harbor any vitriol to their company or their users, I still can’t say the same about Pamac. Considering how Manjaro initially impressed me (briefly) a few times years ago, I honestly wish I could like it more for what it is. But now? I have a difficult time recommending it to most people.