I am a Linux noobie and have only used Mint for around six months now. While I have definitely learned a lot, I don’t have the time to always be doing crazy power user stuff and just want something that works out of the box. While I love Mint, I want to try out other decently easy to use distros as well, specifically not based on Ubuntu, so no Pop OS. Is Manjaro a possibly good distro for me to check out?
I’ve been using Manjaro (XFCE edition) as my daily driver, both on a laptop and a desktop system for more than 6 years now. I’ve tried many others beforehand: Ubuntu and its variations, Arch, Fedora, Tumbleweed, …
But Manjaro was what made me stop hopping around. While it’s true that it has some pitfalls (e.g. cert issues, AUR incompatibility at times), to this day it’s working well enough for me that I don’t feel like switching away.
I’m not just browsing web on it either. Software engineering, music production, image and video processing, etc.
Then again, I don’t consider myself a beginner at this point and can troubleshoot a fair amount of issues now that I simply couldn’t when I started using Linux more than a decade ago.
I also try to:
I also always appreciated the fact that I could get away with not doing a system update for like six weeks and then do a big one (as mentioned, in combination with reading their update announcement). That’s always something that didn’t quite work for me on Arch in the past (then again, I still was a beginner back then, so most “reinstall to solve this problem” situations back then were on me).
What if Manjaro really would get worse enough so I’d want to switch? I guess EndeavourOS would be an option, because it’s very close to Arch, but at the same time, it seemingly offers a graphical installer that hopefully will set itself up properly on a laptop. Then again, I haven’t installed Arch in quite a while now. Maybe the install experience has gotten much nicer.