Manjaro still hasn't broken once for me. I probably have more AUR packages than ones from the official repos at this point, and I've used the three branches it offers.
Manjaro was one of many I tried after becoming increasingly unhappy with Mint. It's also the one I stuck with, and it's run just fine for me for years. I accept that the reports of it being flawed have merit, but I care the most about my own experience, which has been excellent. If you want to test it, by all means, test it! Find out how it works for you personally.
But also try EndeavourOS and other Arch derivatives. One of those might be more to your taste.
@clobubba@valentino@nerdschleife@VoltaicGRiD I did the exact same thing. Mint and then manjaro got me to stick with Linux but I’d never recommend it now when endeavor os is right there
It's fine. I have a dozen installs of it out in the wild, with very illiterate users, and have had almost no calls from them for problems in the 5+ years that they've been using it.
Everyone likes to hate Manjaro, but frankly it's bulletproof.
You have to keep updating it fairly often, otherwise things slip through the cracks. Most recently on a machine that hadn't been updated in about a year it wasn't able to install anything because it couldn't update its GPG keyring anymore. I find the solution to be pacman-keys --refresh-keys or something like that. Why they can't do that as part of one of the updates, I don't know.
There's also small things that crop up during normal installs but that's to be expected on any distro due to bugs in various packages.
Manjaro is fine. Ran it for a year straight before I broked it.
My 2 cents is this. Don't install from AUR unless you have to. Thats how i broked my manjaro install when i was uninstalling packages to fix a bad install. So my install order to protect myself is:
Yes the AUR is the best feature of Arch, which is why I am still using an Arch distro and not Fedora or Debain.
However one of Manjaro's features which other Linux distros don't have, is how much of the OS's troubleshooting and repair is in GUIs. For the most part I can setup a fresh Manjaro install without touching the command line once. And that's how I want to use my machines, I want to just browse the web, play games, or do office tasks (the reason I use a computer), not trying to figure out how to install a GUI package manager from the AUR in EndeavourOS since it doesn't come with one.
I wouldn't consider Fedora or Opensuse TW better than Manjaro. Just trading one issue for another. Honestly I replaced my 1 year old Manjaro install (when I borked my DE) with Fedora.
Fedora lasted 1 month before the btfs filesystem broke and I lost all of my files with no way to recover. Ontop of the difficulty of adding community copr repos for features like XPadNeo, DNF being so slow that Discover would barley function, and being about 2 months behind software fixes for a specific graphic driver bug that prevented me from playing some UE4 game.
Wasn't Manjaro supposed to be the stable version of Arch? That's what I've heard.
The few years I had with Arch was pretty nice, but when something broke, it was pain to get it back working because downgrading wasn't (isn't?) supported. I guess I should have used snapshots of my whole system back then.
Honestly straight arch was more stable for me.
I barely knew anything about the AUR back then, I didn't break it installing or tweaking anything. I just customised KDE a bit. I didn't even have a dedicated GPU - I was using Intel integrated