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I have a theory that the only reason Manjaro is popular is that for the longest time, Arch did not have an installer. Do not underestimate the power of making things easier for your users.
I have a theory that the only reason Manjaro is popular is that for the longest time, Arch did not have an installer. Do not underestimate the power of making things easier for your users.
For one, it's not necessary. Most of these offshoot distributions do is install a desktop environment and put some theming on it, the package management is largely identical. Just install that stuff yourself, 99% of it is customization. Secondly don't install an OS from an organization you can't be sure is going to be around in 5 years, it's just asking for maintenance issues.
There does seem to be some stability issues (particularly in the boot/suspend logic/login logic), meaning that there are times where the system freaks out and will enable (for example) RAID in the bios. This gives a very disturbing recovery process, as a live-disk doesn't immediately detect that RAID is enabled and no drives are found by the bios otherwise, but the grub firmware remains in the boot-up process.
I wouldn't recommend Arch for all users, and the switch between AUR managers, packages etc is definitely some deep topics for most.
Personally I think Arch, even Majaro, is better than the Canonical path.
The i3 community Manjaro made me love tiling window managers. And Manjaro Architect was like a halfway point between the hand-holding installer and the minimal Arch installation experience. It helped me work out what I liked and get to the point where I could administer everything.
I wasn't aware of all the controversies. The only one that popped up on my radar was the treasurer thing. That's all too bad.
However I am looking to switch to a different distro, mainly because I've felt a strange dynamic between the Manjaro leadership and users. I would rather spend my time in a community I feel better about.
I imagine that most people don't have similar concerns, which is why Manjaro attracts users.
While I don't know the technical side of things now, Manjaro was great as a product. It was far more stable than Ubuntu which was unstable and had older packages. Manjaro's community was awesome and they used to listen to the community as well. The forum was one of a kind. I learned a lot and made good online buds there.
Things started to change when they jumped into business and wanted to make money. They started becoming ignorant of requests and complaints from community. They also stopped doing the original way of things with respect to the distro. That is, they started violating the 2 weeks thing with packages. They sometimes for selective packages went directly to upstream devs ignoring the arch repos. KDE and Systemd are examples IIRC. This means the advantages of tested arch packages arriving to your system 2 weeks after was not there anymore. This borked a lot of systems and brought new issues issues as well. Their excuse was they wanted latest packages. But KDE was connected from a git repo if I remember it correctly. I am not sure if that was stable releases but from development branch of KDE (please verify this specific part, I might be wrong about this as I don't remember well. I don't want to be spreading fake news). Also, systemd. This meant directly going to upstream dev packaging without arch's testing or whatsoever. I remember increased borks after this started happening.
Then just like the blog post mentioned, Jonathon who was handling community and loved by the whole community was thrown out of the team because of the money problem. He was the glue between community and devs. He always tried to help the users. And once that happened, I started became very skeptical.
To make things worse, they had an issue with forums and it went offline. Instead of recovering from backup, they created a new forum where we all had to re-register. The old forum had all the conversations about the money issue which ended up with Jonathon being kicked out. And all the old users from beginning who have been there from the beginning. Their excuse was they wanted to start fresh. They did bring the old forum back in a different URL and put it in read only mode. But I always found it the most effective tactic to kill things slowly. Not bringing back the old one would be extremely criticized. They lost a huge chunk of old users who were frustrated for varied reasons then. They mostly left frustrated. And most new users wouldn't know or ever come across the old conversations. Most old users didn't join the new forum. And all the conversations was smartly hidden away this way. They can wash their hands off by saying - hey! It's available to read. We are not hiding anything. The worst was that they made the new forum bloody strict. This meant no more questioning the team. That was my tipping point. I installed arch and been happy. I saw Jonathon in Arch. Not sure whether he is working with Arch team.
They messed up a perfect system. They could just continue with the old way. Manjaro could've helped arch a lot. But they don't. They did revolutionise things like Manjaro Hardware Detection (MHWD) which automatically installs all your drivers including the graphics card in single click. You could install multiple kernel versions and switch between kernels. This was all nice at the time. But they borked it for some cash. Glad I moved on. Looks like they messed it up technically as well in the last 3+ years.