4 ms·

If you like to tinker for hours, Arch. Otherwise Manjaro, which works out of the box and still gives you the benefits of Arch.

nvarsj 7y ago
You really don’t need to tinker with Arch much at all. Linux and systemd have sane defaults for everything these days. An Arch install takes me about 15 minutes, I install Gnome, NetworkManager, GDM and am done. The Arch package manager is so much better than the debian/ubuntu/red hat ecosystem that it is totally worth it for a developer. Almost every esoteric package is managed by someone on AUR so you get self updating packages installed with a single command for almost any software you need. All software is kept in sync with upstream so no need to hack in stuff for times when you need the latest package. Of course you’ll need to know basic Linux fundamentals and understand systemd at a basic level to get through the install process - but these are not hard, I think.
- jplayer01 7y ago
  I've done it countless times. There's always tinkering. It does not work out of the box. You might think so because you've memorized all the steps, but there's so much that needs to be thought of in the first place and then configured.
eptcyka 7y ago
Manjaro is strictly worse when it comes to the quality of software. I wouldn't agree that installing Arch is that big of a hassle - yes, you don't a nice menu based installer, but really, after setting up all of your partitions, installing the root filesystem, adding a user, and installing some packages, and installing hte bootloader, what else is there to do? To be fair, the install process has become easier over the years, as things like timezones and locales are becoming easier to configure due to systemd. But I must concede, if you've never partitioned a drive manually, or added a user, you'll want to take your time. And I always read the wiki's install instructions anyway. And whilst this does mean that there's a bit more complexity associated with setting up Arch, if you're using installing a non-standard OS on your hardware, the knowledge you gain will by doing so will almost always turn out to be useful in some way. As far as tinkering with it, I've never had to explicitly tinker with exotic configs to get my hardware to work as good or better than it would on Ubuntu, and to get my exotic config requirements to work is far easier on Arch than it is on Debian, Ubuntu or Fedora. Manjaro is so broken that I can't even boot the gnome installer on a VM. Besides, it's far easier to manage my machine if there's no auto-updater grabbing a lock on my package manager on for the first 15 minutes of a boot, every boot (looking at you Fedora), or having an update process that may leave you with a severely outdated kernel even though you jumped through the hoops to get a recent kernel (Looking at you Ubuntu 16.04 LTS).
- jplayer01 7y ago
  > Manjaro is strictly worse when it comes to the quality of software. I haven't made this experience with Manjaro on several systems. Setting up Arch isn't just about partitioning and adding a user. That's trivial stuff that I'm simply not talking about. Though somehow Arch's documentation has become significantly worse for complete newbies ever since they got rid of the new user's guide and you end up having to read a bunch of utterly irrelevant stuff in order to find the magic incantation that actually works (and no, it doesn't actually explain anywhere why it works the way it does). I've had to do tons of messing around with settings just to get Arch working properly on different systems. I had problems with resume working properly on my Thinkpad for forever, and less decently supported systems had more issues. I'm just not that kind of user anymore and I don't want to be my own tech support. I have enough to juggle in userland pertaining to my actual job that I simply do. not. want. anything going wrong that I'll have to dig into some obscure config file somewhere to fix. Manjaro gives me most of the benefits of Arch without having to waste my time with setting up an Arch system just perfectly so it simply works. I have access to the AUR and I have reasonably up-to-date packages (and I do run unstable on my laptop, which usually works fine). Some people just want to use Linux, not live and breath Linux, and this constant resistance against users who don't want to wade knee-deep in config bullshit is completely infuriating. You run Arch. Successfully. Congratulations. You're better than everybody else.
  - eptcyka 7y ago
    I never tried to imply that running one distribution implies any kind of supremacy, so I do apologize if I came across like that. My opinion that Manjaro provides bad software stems from two things - my short experiences trying to set it up to test userland things that did not work correctly on Manjaro and a significant amount of bug reports coming in from Manjaro when compared to other distros. But this being Linux, it's feasible that you've had a much better experience with Manjaro, and since I don't have any good statistical data about the bug reports I am aware of, I'll concede that is is just a fluke. However, the packages do seem to lag behind by quite a bit. I'll have to disagree that the current installation wiki is worse than the beginner's guide - it might containt irrelevant things, but that is only because there isn't one correct way to install Arch, and most of the duplication stems from different filesystem setups and different bootloaders. It's not meant to be read as prose, but the original beginners guide wasn't either, since it too had a lot of duplication of steps to deal with the multiplicity of installation options.

nvarsj 7y ago

You really don’t need to tinker with Arch much at all. Linux and systemd have sane defaults for everything these days. An Arch install takes me about 15 minutes, I install Gnome, NetworkManager, GDM and am done. The Arch package manager is so much better than the debian/ubuntu/red hat ecosystem that it is totally worth it for a developer. Almost every esoteric package is managed by someone on AUR so you get self updating packages installed with a single command for almost any software you need. All software is kept in sync with upstream so no need to hack in stuff for times when you need the latest package. Of course you’ll need to know basic Linux fundamentals and understand systemd at a basic level to get through the install process - but these are not hard, I think.

jplayer01 7y ago
I've done it countless times. There's always tinkering. It does not work out of the box. You might think so because you've memorized all the steps, but there's so much that needs to be thought of in the first place and then configured.

eptcyka 7y ago

Manjaro is strictly worse when it comes to the quality of software. I wouldn't agree that installing Arch is that big of a hassle - yes, you don't a nice menu based installer, but really, after setting up all of your partitions, installing the root filesystem, adding a user, and installing some packages, and installing hte bootloader, what else is there to do? To be fair, the install process has become easier over the years, as things like timezones and locales are becoming easier to configure due to systemd. But I must concede, if you've never partitioned a drive manually, or added a user, you'll want to take your time. And I always read the wiki's install instructions anyway. And whilst this does mean that there's a bit more complexity associated with setting up Arch, if you're using installing a non-standard OS on your hardware, the knowledge you gain will by doing so will almost always turn out to be useful in some way. As far as tinkering with it, I've never had to explicitly tinker with exotic configs to get my hardware to work as good or better than it would on Ubuntu, and to get my exotic config requirements to work is far easier on Arch than it is on Debian, Ubuntu or Fedora. Manjaro is so broken that I can't even boot the gnome installer on a VM. Besides, it's far easier to manage my machine if there's no auto-updater grabbing a lock on my package manager on for the first 15 minutes of a boot, every boot (looking at you Fedora), or having an update process that may leave you with a severely outdated kernel even though you jumped through the hoops to get a recent kernel (Looking at you Ubuntu 16.04 LTS).

jplayer01 7y ago
> Manjaro is strictly worse when it comes to the quality of software. I haven't made this experience with Manjaro on several systems. Setting up Arch isn't just about partitioning and adding a user. That's trivial stuff that I'm simply not talking about. Though somehow Arch's documentation has become significantly worse for complete newbies ever since they got rid of the new user's guide and you end up having to read a bunch of utterly irrelevant stuff in order to find the magic incantation that actually works (and no, it doesn't actually explain anywhere why it works the way it does). I've had to do tons of messing around with settings just to get Arch working properly on different systems. I had problems with resume working properly on my Thinkpad for forever, and less decently supported systems had more issues. I'm just not that kind of user anymore and I don't want to be my own tech support. I have enough to juggle in userland pertaining to my actual job that I simply do. not. want. anything going wrong that I'll have to dig into some obscure config file somewhere to fix. Manjaro gives me most of the benefits of Arch without having to waste my time with setting up an Arch system just perfectly so it simply works. I have access to the AUR and I have reasonably up-to-date packages (and I do run unstable on my laptop, which usually works fine). Some people just want to use Linux, not live and breath Linux, and this constant resistance against users who don't want to wade knee-deep in config bullshit is completely infuriating. You run Arch. Successfully. Congratulations. You're better than everybody else.
- eptcyka 7y ago
  I never tried to imply that running one distribution implies any kind of supremacy, so I do apologize if I came across like that. My opinion that Manjaro provides bad software stems from two things - my short experiences trying to set it up to test userland things that did not work correctly on Manjaro and a significant amount of bug reports coming in from Manjaro when compared to other distros. But this being Linux, it's feasible that you've had a much better experience with Manjaro, and since I don't have any good statistical data about the bug reports I am aware of, I'll concede that is is just a fluke. However, the packages do seem to lag behind by quite a bit. I'll have to disagree that the current installation wiki is worse than the beginner's guide - it might containt irrelevant things, but that is only because there isn't one correct way to install Arch, and most of the duplication stems from different filesystem setups and different bootloaders. It's not meant to be read as prose, but the original beginners guide wasn't either, since it too had a lot of duplication of steps to deal with the multiplicity of installation options.