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I've seen a lot of people who quite dislike Manjaro, and I'm not really sure why. I'm myself am not a Manjaro user, but I did use it for quite a while and enjoyed my experienced, as it felt almost ready out of the box. I'm not here to judge, just wanted to hear the opinion of the community on the matter. Thanks!
I heard that the maintainers let some important web certificates expire, which is a big no-no.
Never used it, but in my mind it will always be the distribution that told its users to roll the date on their machines back because they forgot to renew their website's SSL certificate.
Twice.
I use Manjaro ARM on my Orange PI because I couldn't get Arch ARM to work on it, while Manjaro has support of my devices out of the box. Since I installed a minimal possible version (without any DE), it doesn't feel bloated or something. It feels like I'm using Arch but with slower updates. Overall, it's good and I don't notice much difference from Arch. But anyway, I haven't tried it for a desktop station.
I don't know. I don't feel right if not arch like something missing
Manjaro is what got me into Arch so I'll always have a soft spot for it. I don't keep up with internet drama so much but I do remember people saying some stuff about the devs being shady/shitty. But I'm not sure how much truth there is to that.
Manjaro is what got me into Arch
Is Manjaro even considered an Arch? I though it's Arch based. Maybe I'm wrong
It is. It's so close that you can out of the box use arch package manager to install packages.
And manjaro package management is technically the same. Just slowed down a little bit.
You could say that arch is "testing" and manjaro "stable".
Although arch is very stable in itself, don't think of it as of Gentoo Unstable.
Rather "manjaro will have the newest kernel after a few months, not tomorrow"
I liked it when I used it but that was 5 years ago and there was still dev drama even back then. Contributors said they didn't feel valued iirc.
I installed Manjaro sometime during 2018, and I have been using it without any major issues. The only issue I had is when AUR packages fail to update. I find that most of the time the issue will resolve itself eventually anyway. Overall, I feel that Manjaro is a nice and stable distro.
The only negative I can think of is the community. At the time, I was bluntly told to read the manual whenever I needed help or pointers. But, my negative experience was from a few years ago, so hopefully the community has improved today.
My daily driver distro today is Mint, which I think is more polished than Manjaro.
Manjaro was my intro to Linux, but now that I know more about it, I can't recommend it in good conscience. Letting their SSL certs expire is something that happens (even though they could automate it), but telling their users to change their clocks so it works is a big no-no.
Worse than that is how they manage packages from upstream. Simply freezing them for two weeks is, in my opinion, the worst of both worlds. You don't get timely security updates, but you still end up with the issues of being on the bleeding edge - just late. It also means that if you use the AUR (which is really one of the biggest perks of Arch-based systems), it's possible that the necessary dependencies are out of date.
I think that if one wants "Arch with an installer" they should go with EndeavourOS, or try the archinstall script.
Simply freezing them for two weeks
That's not what they're doing at all. That dumb myth needs to die.
Can you expand on this? A source would be great here to properly debunk this.
Sure. When it comes to updates, Manjaro is pretty much doing what every single other distro is doing. Updates that are buggy don't get pushed to the stable branch until they're fixed up, and security updates tend to get pushed through faster than feature updates. The time period that updates get held up by is not a fixed duration, it depends on the specific package and update and can be anywhere between a few days and a few weeks.
As a concrete example, with some major Plasma updates Manjaro has waited for three or even four point releases (4 / 8 weeks) before considering it stable enough vs the newest point release of the previous major release, and following point releases after that get pushed to stable much faster.
As another point, even Arch has a very similar process... Their policy on pushing updates is far more geared towards pushing updates quickly than towards not breaking things, but otherwise it's pretty much the same.
Idk about a source on this stuff though. There's stuff like https://wiki.manjaro.org/index.php/Switching_Branches but I don't know anything better.
Manjaro packages start their lives in the unstable branch. Once they are a deemed stable, they are moved to the testing branch, where more tests will be realized to ensure the package is ready to be submitted to the stable branch
It has no meaningful place or benefits and everyone defending it seems to just be saying "erm, well why not!" and ignoring the problems its caused when compared to distros like endeavouros
This. It feels like they occupy this weird space between stable and rolling releases that doesn't really accomplish much. Add on the issues (technical and ethical) over the years, and Manjaro occupies a strange place. Especially as EndeavourOS and even the arch-install script have evolved, it doesn't quite hold the "arch on easy-mode" vibe it used to.
I've been using it for nearly 3 years and encountered minimal issues. I'm using it on a Lenovo E14 all AMD laptop, mostly for gaming and web browsing.