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Goldilocks distro?
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this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2024
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If you're lazy (which I take to mean you like low maintenance) and haven't tried a rolling release distro, you need to try Manjaro. It's downstream of Arch (like Mint vs Debian) but with a lot of QoL improvements that take the edge off.
It's"Goldilocks" for me because it's rolling and has recent packages but also very low maintenance. I was sick of 3rd-party repo incompatibilies and update issues on Ubuntu.
It's a curated take on Arch in that it sources packages from Arch but holds them back until they're in a decent shape. Recent example was the Plasma 6 which they've held back a couple of months until most bugs had been cleared, but normally they release packages on a 2 week cycle.
It works out of the box, keeps working indefinitely (5 years going for me), and they have integrated system snapshots if you use BTRFS for root, just in case (automatically takes snapshots before every update, which you can restore from Grub). Never had to use a snapshot (did it only once to see if it works).
Limitations of Manjaro compared to Arch:
Regarding that last point, there's a very vocal minority that will smear Manjaro any chance they get All I can say is, try it for yourself.
Not being able to say “I run Arch BTW” is a dealbreaker.
The Manjaro team have had well publicised mistakes in the past which I think the community were right to highlight. However to be fair to them it was like a decade ago they had the PGP one, and they seem to have become a more professional outfit since then.
All distributions make mistakes. It's a complex job. Debian stable had a local root elevation exploit on for a while a couple of months ago and nobody batted an eye. People would have a field day if that happened to Manjaro.
It's a double standard borne out of the resentment of a vocal minority and that sucks. The Linux community wastes so much energy on these pointless feuds. (And then they wonder why there's never the year of the Linux desktop...) Linux and FOSS are not about treating user share as a zero sum game but unfortunately there are people who can only think in terms of "if you use another distro you're dumb and I must ridicule you".
It's an especially narrow-minded take with distros like Manjaro, which is different enough from Arch that its users were never going to use Arch anyway.
I can confirm it works as advertised, has very low maintenance and good performance.
I use it for gaming with Steam, Heroic, Lutris and a bunch of emulators, web browsing, some light development and home lab.