Absolutely solid retort that totally addresses what I said on the merits. Also, way to nail the tone. Both hallmarks in debate from people that know they are right.

For anybody reading from the sidelines, most of the “TNT” in my analogy comes from the fact that the Manjaro repos are incompatible with the AUR.

Read both comments and decide for yourself what advice to take. I have offered my warning but do not wish to battle about it.

The cynicism is well deserved. They have been on 2.99 for years.

That said, I have been using 3.0RC1 for a bit. It ships packaged with my current distro and has worked well for me. This release should be quite usable even though 3.0 has not officially shipped.

“Poor design choice” that comes across at first as a nice feature to end-users is the underlying philosophy in Manjaro.

This is why you have so many fans saying that it is great and that the detractors are wrong. It is also why it has so many passionate detractors.

Manjaro is like a nice car with a canister of TNT attached to it. At first, all you experience is the nice car. If you really like the car, it is easily to feel smarter than the guy who warned you not to drive it. As time goes on, the chances that the TNT explodes goes up. However, it is always possible that your roads are smooth enough that it never blows up for you. Regardless, if you know about the design flaw, recommending such a car to others is really, really bad advice.

Using the AUR with Manjaro is like driving the car above on a gravel road. It does not guarantee that the TNT will go off, but it makes it much more likely.

I hope Manjaro continues to work well for you. Truly.

Also, please do not encourage others to use it.

Manjaro is “Arch derived” but is not Arch. Manjaro maintains its own package repos. And one of the big differences is that the packages in Manjaro are held back a few weeks before release. This difference in base repositories can matter if you try to use the AUR.

In many ways, EOS is not even a distro. It uses the Arch repos unmodified. It uses the Arch kernel unmodified. You could say that EOS is an opinionated Arch installer with pragmatic defaults. EOS has its own repos but there are only handful of packages in them, most of which are optional utilities or theming. Once installed, EOS is essentially Arch. As such, it is 100% compatible with the AUR. Two of the packages in the EOS repos are yay and paru which means the AUR works out of the box (unlike Arch itself).

You may think I am being unfair to EOS. It is my favourite distro. Manjaro is the only distro I warn people not to use.

Use Slackware to Linux like it is 1993. Nothing wrong with that.

Ya. Ok. But pacman does not let you use the AUR. Using the AUR is one did the primary reasons to choose Arch.

So, if you want to use the AUR, you need to use something like yay or paru. And, if you do, you no longer need to use pacman.

To be clear to the newbies, pacman -Syu updates your entire system ( except packages from the AUR ). yay -Syu updates your entire system, including packages from the AUR.

If you just ran yay -Syu, running pacman -Syu will report that there is “nothing to do” since your system will already be up to date.

The same is true if you sub paru for yay above.

/s This was a Snap trap and you walked right into it!! You are right, Flatpaks are great bit you cannot use them for everything. We all need to switch to Snaps so we can build our base packages in them!

Run a 32 bit distro. It is the only thing that will run well on 2 GB of RAM. It will run better than you think.

Q4OS, Antix, MX Linux, Damn Small Linux, and even pure 32 bit Debian are decent candidates. If you use Q4, give the Trinity desktop a shot.

I like Andelie Linux as well but MUSL may cause problems for an unsophisticated user.