This site gives some reasons: https://manjarno.snorlax.sh/

I tried it on bare metal some years ago. The main issue I had was that it wasn’t very stable and I kept running into bugs that made the system hard to use. I’m sure they have fixed that by now but that was my experience.

I heard that the maintainers let some important web certificates expire, which is a big no-no.

Manjaro was the first Linux distro I used as a daily driver, from October 2020 to July 2021, when I switched to EndeavourOS. To be fair the main reason I switched was all those previous mess-ups by the developers and the troubled past, which I didn’t know of when I moved to Linux. In the year or so I used it, I didn’t have any messed update or crash myself.

I would say it’s still a fine distro for beginners who want to try a rolling release (as EndeavourOS is imho better in every way, but it doesn’t come with any GUI package manager so I wouldn’t call it a distro for absolute beginners), but can’t see any other usage case, as it’s especially risky if you want to use packages from the AUR.

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.

I have an XFCE VM of Manjaro I regularly use and it’s a great distribution. I converted mine to unstable, which just means it pulls down Arch packages right away so closer to Endeavor OS or ArcoLinux (there is also stable and testing). They have some nice tools and very easy to change kernels. I think some people have had it break something and get butt hurt, but that’s part of bleeding edge Arch and being on a rolling release. Either watch the forum for issues, or be prepared to fix it, roll back… Some of us think life is too short to do a manual Arch install, so these Arch based distros that are easy to install are great, and add some extra value and tools on top of Arch.

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

I like the idea and used Manjaro for a few years, but its run by less competent people than Id like (or at least in comparison to other distros), so I stopped and moved to a different distro.

Manjaro had a rough history of not taking security seriously. I hope they have improved, but the impression stuck.

They have done a few things right by making Arch more approachable when Arch was more of a RTFM type distribution. Now Arch is easier and even ships with an installer, but Manjaro’s installer is easy.

The end result is still that the user still needs to manage an Arch distro. I would recommend learning the Arch way from Arch instead of taking the easy road.

If you want an easy distro, rolling releases, and up-to-date packages, I would recommend Debian Did over Manjaro. If you want Arch, use Arch.

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

I have heard things previously about Manjaro that make me want to avoid it.

OTOH, as an Arch user, some of the things I feel could use improvement are better with Manjaro. Pretty much every Arch derivative does something about the major pain points of Arch, though, slapping on a installation gui (though, honestly, just advertising the archinstall CLI script that’s on the install usb stick and fixing it up a bit would help Arch), and giving you an AUR helper by default.

I recently tried the XFCE version of Endeavor in a vm, and I quite like it, so if I move from Arch, I’m more inclined to go that direction.

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.

In my opinion, people should just use Arch with the archinstall script if they need help or EndeavourOS for an easy GUI installer.

Irresponsible devs, delayed packages for no reason causing massive issues with ours and quite often invalid site certificates due to neglect. It’s just arch but worse since it uses their repo which delays packages for practically no reason causing aur incompatibilities. Endeavour is a far better distro for beginners (or arch install script) with the exception of it not having pamac preinstalled.