Endeavor seems like a better option. The majaro devs don't seem particularly trustworthy as OS devs, mainly because they hold back security updates as a policy and have allowed things like ssl certs to lapse multiple times. Endeavor gets you the benefits Manjaro provides without the nonsense.
EndeavourOS is my preference. I appreciate that they don’t really modify the Arch experience in any annoying way. Manjaro seems to always break shit. Plus the EOS forums are amazing.
holy cow i had no idea manjaro was this bad
@yote_zip @neurodivergentAF lot’s of instability. Understandable. I’ll probably steer clear, if not completely away, from Manjaro :/
As someone who tried both, I think Endevour is better. 1.It's more bleeding edge. 2. It's as close to vanilla Arch as you can get with a gui installer. 3. The dev team seems to be more compitent then the Manjaro team (i.e: shit doesn't break because someone pushed a WIP package). 4. Better community support (I mean, it's literally just Arch with a fancy installer).
They're both fairly easy to install. And it's fairly easy to switch between the two.
It's really not that hard to follow the wiki to install Arch. I feel like there's a lot of maintaining to do when using Arch, so you might as well get used to the terminal. It wasn't really an issue when I was using it daily, but has become a chore now that I boot up my laptop once or twice a month.
Funnily enough, I'm always on my Steam Deck now and that is based on Arch, too.
You have to remember that most people aren't power users. A lot of people find if difficult to even install Windows. Vanilla Arch isn't for everybody.
Honestly, in that case, I can't recommend Arch to those users. Nothing wrong with Ubuntu for beginners and there's so much documentation.
Yeah, I’ve used Linux in some capacity since the late nineties and know my way around. I can’t be bothered to fiddle with an Arch install, I’ve moved on, I got better things to do. So I decided to try out EOS on my new laptop. A few clicks and it was running with proprietary NV drivers by default, which are updated as needed by yay. I was playing games within 20 min from my Steam Library preserved on another ssd.
Only thing I had to do was install btrfs-assistant, plasma-Wayland and whatever apps I need.
The most laborious bit was configuring various apps to use Wayland but that didn’t have to happen immediately.
EndeavourOS is the right answer.
Nobody has mentioned the guided installer that now ships with the vanilla Arch iso: archinstall
I've done the Arch installation from scratch a few times to add some inches to my e-peen, but the CLI installer does everything so nicely that I haven't bothered with a manual install for a while now.
I generally choose gnome (wayland), and add pamac-nosnap from the AUR, and it's a super user friendly experience. Especially if you choose to use BTRFS during the install and then setup timeshift and add the timeshift-autosnap package once you are in the DE. For the handful of times I've ever had an issue with a package update, I just roll back to a previous snapshot and I'm back in action.
I was expecting the responses to be more mixed. But pretty much the issues I see here confirms to me that Manjaro is not the winner. I think Endeavour is going to be the one I will install.
Endeavour
I choose Endeavor because it's basically Arch with GUI.
*GUI installer. Post install it does not even ship the gui software center of your DE
Endeavour is as close as you can get to pure Arch with a GUI installer + pretty neat QOL features OOTB (reflector to update mirrors, the AUR's already installed and ready to go, etc). 90% of what applies to vanilla Arch applies to Endeavour when it comes to fixes, and the community is super helpful and friendly in my experience. It's kinda light on stuff when compared to other ready to go Linux Distros, but hey, that just means less pre-installed apps you either never use or have to uninstall
Manjaro is an Arch based distro that kinda sucks at being an Arch based distro (essentially, the updates are held back by a couple of weeks for better and worse, WIP packages sometimes slip through to the repos and can cause problems to your system, and you can forget about using the AUR--or well, you can, but the AUR and Manjaro are nortorious for not playing nice with one another). Troubleshooting the thing tested my patience personally, because like someone else here said: it basically found a unique way to break itself every time I updated the system and I just got....tired, eventually. Manjaro also comes with basically everything you could possibly need pre-installed and then some, so that's neat if you're not in the mood to hunt down all your apps.
If you're cool with using the terminal to update, install stuff (or you could also install pamac or Octopi, nothing's stopping you, and it works) and troubleshoot, try Endeavour. You can make it exactly like Manjaro without the defects with a bit of work if you want
If you don't mind being extra careful with what you install (really that's standard practice, but hey, I've never found a WIP package anywhere other than Manjaro, so make of that what you will), are willing to tolerate constant mild to severe breakage, and just using Flatpaks and appimages over the AUR, go with Manjaro
@neurodivergentAF Go with EndeavourOS. I used Manjaro for 1.5 years and a little more. Just switched to EndeavourOS. I'm not listing here all the stuff that Manjaro did wrong, but rather point out a specific problem. Manjaro holding packages is a problem, if you ever use the AUR. Because the packages on the AUR normally expect the newest versions from Archlinux. So the mixture of hold back packages from Manjaro and the newest one from AUR can cause problems. And you can wait weeks before Manjaro updates the packages. And also I personally encountered 2 bugs with the pamac tool (which is recommended over pacman and handles the AUR as well), which one of them I reported and it got fixed.
I switched to EndeavourOS since half a year and don't have any of these AUR concerns. The distro maintainer aren't doing any obvious stupid stuff as well. It's closer to real Archlinux and overall feels great.
I’ve been on Manjaro for about 1.5 years now too. I switched over to the Unstable branch a while back, which fixed this issue for me. This branch seems to be getting all packages at the same speed as regular Arch. Plus, I still get the Manjaro-specific kernels, access to their repos, integrated pamac, etc. For now, I’m sticking with Manjaro this way.
EndeavourOS is basically Arch with a nice installer and a few extra QoL packages while Manjaro manages their own repositories and adds things like mhwd that change system management to be a little different than Arch.
I much prefer Endeavour since I already do everything from the command line anyway. Also, while most info about Arch applies to Manjaro it doesn't always and I found that very annoying when trying to troubleshoot.
I've also installed Arch a few times and it went fine, but the Endeavour installer is a much nicer experience.
I've used both. Manjaro, in their attempt to be "user friendly", winds up disconnecting you from what makes Arch good. EndeavorOS, on the other hand, is basically Arch nicely set up for a "daily driver" PC along with some nice tools of their own you can use or not at your discretion. I've also used just plain Arch and I actually prefer EndeavourOS of the three.
TBH I want "user friendly" with up to date drivers. Most Ubuntu bases distros dont offer that and fedora doesn't have the same support with copr that AUR has.
While I don't agree with Manjaro's parent company, as someone who doesn't want to tinker with their os, I prefer it.
Used both, and I prefer Endeavor, had been using it for an year. Endeavor feels like Arch with some useful additions while Manjaro felt bloated.
After migrating from Solus a while ago I tried Manjaro, but quickly decided Endeavour OS seemed better. I mostly wanted Arch with some sane defaults so I think it was a better fit for me. However, I think plain Arch is also a strong contender despite IMO more annoying setup. I have had some issues with keys not syncing properly from the EOS repository.
went from manjaro to endevour (both kde). for me personally, there wasnt much difference, just less stuff preinstalled (bloat?) on endevouros.
I've tried and used both. They are both arch, and they both have their uses.
Endeavour is an excellent "arch with GUI" as another user pointed out. However its missing GUI elements which I personally expect from a modern OS like a Package Manager. There are work arounds like Buah, but I found them to not be as polished as having a distro shipped with it.
Manjaro on the other end is also Arch, but with a heavy emphasis on User Experience. The depth and detail their GUI is, means you don't need a terminal if you don't want to use one. Kernel, Systemd, and more has a GUI interface baked in to areas you'd expect them, like in setting.
But their packages being behind means that installing from the AUR can cause issues when the AUR package expects a newer package that manjaro is still evaluating.
For me, I am using Manjaro since I just want a work station that works. And not having to deal with a terminal to fix most problems is something I desire in an operating system.
With that said when I got EndeavourOS to a point where its mostly usable with GUI, there was no noticeable difference in day to day use. I just found it tiring when something broke.
I've used Linux since the mid 90s, but I switched to Linux as my desktop daily driver just 2 years ago and I went with Manjaro. I was prepared to switch to a pure Arch setup, but I'm still vary happy with Manjaro. I use AUR, but only very few packages.
Yup my install order is
Repo
FlatPak (if it doesn't need is level stuff)
AUR
FWIW i've been using endeavouros for about a month and i'm absolutely in love with it. their installer is super easy to use and i'm just liking how lightweight and customizable arch is
Decided to stick with pure Arch in the end.
I have switched from manjaro to endeavouros about a month ago. I definitely prefer endeavouros. However, the kernel install GUI in manjaro was nice, made it very easy to get an overview of the available kernels and which ones are still getting support.
i have tried both endeavour is much more stable try manjaro for a few years am using endeavour os for almost a year its much better and gives less issues
I used manjaro first but after hearing about the incompatance of the devs I made the switch to endeavor.
To justify, they've ddosed the aur accidentally twice, their lead arm dev pushed a commit to the asahi kernal that broke half of the users installs, they tried shipping that kernal while it was very much in development with a broken kernal which couldn't actually run while pretending that "manjaro runs on the m1 macbook" (this could have broken users hardware), and they don't properly tell users the dangers of the aur like the time a guy put two calls to an IP logger beside a list of people who can fuck themselves or an on init fork bomb. This should not be a toggle directly next to snaps and flat packs, which are safer than a normal package.
I generally tell people on Manjaro to stay off the AUR. If it's not in their "curated" repository, then just go with the flatpak.
they don't properly tell users the dangers of the aur like the time a guy put two calls to an IP logger beside a list of people who can fuck themselves or an on init fork bomb. This should not be a toggle directly next to snaps and flat packs, which are safer than a normal package.
Flatpaks or snaps are not safer at all, as the package maintainer decides how much sandboxing, if any, is applied by default. Manjaro also very much does have a warning in the settings page for the AUR...
@Zamundaaa Flatpaks are not installed with sudo rights. That's a huge difference.
Not safer than the aur? Where you run a random script from some random guy who is likely unassociated with the project which has very little chance of being audited?
Or a normal package? Which has no sandboxing at all. In that case, yes, one could have a poorly sandboxes app, but the vast majority have some to a larger amount of sandboxing. On top of that, they come from a much more heavily audited place than the aur. It is, on average, safer than the average normally packaged package. Some sandboxing is better than no sandboxing
And no, their warning is not nearly enough. They should state that a person needs to read any package build script before installation and its diff while updating unless they verify the packager is the project maintainer for the application they use
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