You Shouldn't Use Manjaro

this is a plausible consequence of “whoa what if arch infra + polish/friendliness” turning out more popular than expected. you are no longer showing the world a proof of concept; you are now a vendor, like it or not. i'm sympathetic to the associated growing pains

that said, it reinforces my belief that past a certain point, derivative distributions are just kind of uninteresting. if you are at the level where distros primarily distinguish themselves by the out-of-the-box desktop, then fair enough. if you're down here with me in the ninth circle of hell where they primarily distinguish themselves by their package manager, the response to “ok no wait guys so like, it's debian..... but it boots into enlightenment” is just “ugh”

Unfortunately, the installer is kind of buggy. (Or was, the last time I used it.)

Then again, what installer isn't? :p

[1] Software and Updates is the app's name I believe.

Which never happens, even on Arch, where packages aren't held back for 2 weeks like on Manjaro.

Both Arch and Manjaro have been way more stable for me than Ubuntu ever was, and I've used them for like 4 years now. It's counterintuivie, but newer packages seem to work better than older packages. My pet theory for this is that the devs spend most of their attention with the newest versions of their packages. Submit a bug for a DE, and they might tell you to install the newest version to replicate it there (yet you're on Ubuntu...).

I like getting newer packages (which work better) and DEs (which crash less -- see KDE Neon) and faster hardware support.

I'll never go back to a point release distro like Ubuntu or Debian. (Although, apparently, Fedora keeps their packages as new as my Arch system does, the last time I checked, so maybe that'd be an exception. :p)