Sometimes people tell me I should have gone with either Linux Mint or EndeavourOS, and otherwise don’t really tell me why it’s bad, just that it’s bad. So far I only could find one thing, which is that their repo isn’t 100% rolling for stability, and sometimes it does not guarantee stability.
Its fine. If you read through the complaints people list they’re pretty petty. The most common complaint is people dont like that its arch based but doesnt follow the arch release schedule. Which is fair but only affects people who use the aur.
The main positive IMO that manjaro has that other arch based distros miss is that it tries to be fully featured out of the box instead of trying to ship a very light arch install. This means a lot of things work out of the box that need to be installed and configured on other distros.
The negatives is that new users are attracted to it and they dont know how to use linux so they break things and dont know what went wrong or how to fix it.
I’m sorry, but the fact that they failed to renew their SSL certificates and told their users to change their system clocks as a workaround, not once, not twice, but FIVE times so far… well, that’s not petty. That’s security 101. That tells me they can’t be trusted to provide a secure operating system.
The rest of your points, I mostly agree with you on. I really wanted to like Manjaro when I tried it a few years ago. I would love to see more newbie-friendly distros that aren’t based on Ubuntu and GNOME. But I can’t recommend a distro that can’t even manage to do SSL renewals right.
I am defending Manjaro not because I think its a top tier distro that people NEED to use but only because I think the criticism is overblown and its becoming dogma and it needs to be pushed back. I also do not like seeing users who would be fine on the distro are pushed away with scary warnings. There are very few distro choices that new users would pick that would actually be a bad choice, the ones I would say would be Kali and Arch. The rest are fine. Remember when a user asks hey I wanted to try out this distro call Manjaro it seems good and there is like 100 comments making it seem like the stupidest most dangerous choice and recommending a slew of other options they’re probably less likely to suddenly trust that advice and more likely to just stay in the comfort of what they are already on.
For the Manjaro defense I only find 3 instances of their SSL failing and they seem to be for non critical subdomains on the web. Its avoidable but its a mild inconvenience with no critical impact. During my search I see that a ton of the biggest tech companies in the world have had the same issue multiple times on actually critical domains and other distros have had the same issue. Its an SSL cert expiring its like one of the most basic fuckups in IT and it catches everyone thats why a whole industry got made out of products that fix the problem.
The other thing people bring up is the AUR DDos which sounds bad but reading through the AUR bug thread it didnt seem to be a big deal and it had happened multiple times before from bugs in aur helpers. Its software this shit happens, it happens everywhere at every level. Why are we holding a mid tier linux distro with probably 10k users to the standards of apple/microsoft (who have all had similar issues and far far bigger fuckups).