I had Debian and was not satisfied with the fact that I had to wait ages for updates of stuff like KDE Plasma. I wanted something with shorter update intervals.
I decided against Ubuntu because of the company behind it.
I decided against Mint, because it’s on level 3 in the derivate tree, so more places where something can go wrong.
Then I found Manjaro and liked it from the beginning. Very easy to install (no script necessary), awesome custom Plasma theme, short update intervals, …
Arch can be scary. I wanted a reliable, easy OS for private use and I knew, I get that with Manjaro. With Arch, I was not sure whether I might FCK something up.
from what ive heard of manjaro, they do less testing on new packages than arch. also, nothing on arch ever broke my pc except for the clock, which was probably because i configured it wrong (didn’t use archinstall).
only time an update has ever done anything bad was like a week ago when plasma 6.6 launched and the login freezed the pc, but that was on cachyos, not main arch.
Arch derivatives that don’t do anything to the core packages or the root system seem very pointless to me. Because you can setup Vanilla Arch to be exactly like that derivative if you wanted to since Arch being a DIY distro. Arch based derivatives create unnecessary fragmentation in already fragmented Linux world. Arch itself is targeted for intermediate to advanced users to build a system from base.
It makes sense to make derivatives from Debian or Fedora because they have a lot of stuff packed in them for them to be user friendly and work out-of-the-box experience — then derivatives can add from or reduce from to make a distro designed for a specific use which can take much longer time than if the user did it by themselves since those parent distros are usually targeted for non tech enthusiasts.
My thinking process years ago was:
I had Debian and was not satisfied with the fact that I had to wait ages for updates of stuff like KDE Plasma. I wanted something with shorter update intervals.
I decided against Ubuntu because of the company behind it.
I decided against Mint, because it’s on level 3 in the derivate tree, so more places where something can go wrong.
Then I found Manjaro and liked it from the beginning. Very easy to install (no script necessary), awesome custom Plasma theme, short update intervals, …
Arch can be scary. I wanted a reliable, easy OS for private use and I knew, I get that with Manjaro. With Arch, I was not sure whether I might FCK something up.
from what ive heard of manjaro, they do less testing on new packages than arch. also, nothing on arch ever broke my pc except for the clock, which was probably because i configured it wrong (didn’t use archinstall).
only time an update has ever done anything bad was like a week ago when plasma 6.6 launched and the login freezed the pc, but that was on cachyos, not main arch.
I think, I haven’t had any mentionable problem with Manjaro over multiple years.
Arch derivatives that don’t do anything to the core packages or the root system seem very pointless to me. Because you can setup Vanilla Arch to be exactly like that derivative if you wanted to since Arch being a DIY distro. Arch based derivatives create unnecessary fragmentation in already fragmented Linux world. Arch itself is targeted for intermediate to advanced users to build a system from base.
It makes sense to make derivatives from Debian or Fedora because they have a lot of stuff packed in them for them to be user friendly and work out-of-the-box experience — then derivatives can add from or reduce from to make a distro designed for a specific use which can take much longer time than if the user did it by themselves since those parent distros are usually targeted for non tech enthusiasts.