this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2023
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Elementary OS and Manjaro are the big ones IMO. Sure, they've had their heydays, but it's time to move on.
Why?
They're overrated today because they were good at some time in the past and people have to catch up. As for why they're not that good right now:
Elementary OS had at some point in time perhaps the most polished and accessible user interface out of any distro out there. This was mostly due to how much time and effort they had put into their in-house Pantheon desktop environment. And if they would have continued their efforts, then it would have continued to flourish. Unfortunately it failed at keeping their momentum, this is most likely related to internal disputes. I say this because over the years a lot of important members from their team have departed. Right now; it's just a shadow of what it once used to be and the likes of GNOME, KDE and Cinnamon have far surpassed their Pantheon.
While Elementary OS is just plain bad at this point, by contrast Manjaro is actually not that bad. Arguably, it does a lot of good things; Btrfs+Timeshift being one of the big ones. However, freezing packages in a rolling release doesn't make any sense. Furthermore, it's just very unprofessional to let the SSL certificates expire. Mind you; it didn't happen just once or twice, but four times?!?! Today, if one wants a stable rolling release that holds their hands, they should use openSUSE Tumbleweed. If they want to use Arch, then they should just use Arch;
archinstallexists. And if one is not able to install Arch usingarchinstall, then they should question themselves if Arch is even the right distro for them. Finally, if they seek any kind of hand-holding, then there's a plethora of derivative distros of Arch that are as good, if not better than Manjaro. So just to make myself very clear; Manjaro is not bad, it's just overrated; people gravitate too much towards it based on old videos/articles and what not, but it doesn't deserve that gravitation in its current state.Without wanting to be elitist, I'd go further than that. While archinstall is a nice convenience, even the "manual" installation is really just diligently reading and following the wiki guide.
If that's too much for you, you're likely going to struggle when stuff needs manual intervention and you're probably better off with a different distro.
It is or not what you are capable of, it is what you want to do. I have been using Linux since before Slackware; I can install Arch. So, what did I do recently when I needed to setup a spare iMac to prepare a course I am reaching on the side? I used EndeavourOS. My goal had nothing to do with proving my Linux skills. I just needed a nice environment to work in, I needed it quickly, and I needed easy access to quite a lot of other up-to-date software just as quickly and easily. What I needed was Arch with a great installer. Honestly, even just installing yay by default so that I can dive right into the AUR is a great convenience. If there really is something that requires my configuration later, I can do that. If I need to. If there is something beyond my knowledge the Arch wiki is amazing and ( unlike Manjaro ) it is 100% applicable to EndeavourOS. . For me, EndeavourOS strikes the perfect balance.
Of course, one doesn't have to install Arch manually; archiso and Endeavour are great conveniences and exist for a reason.
That doesn't change the fact that people who rely on those tools not because they want to save some time/effort but because they're unable to follow wiki instructions are likely better off with something other than Arch.
I installed Elementary OS on a computer I built for a friend's kid, because I wanted something that was easy to use and low maintenance. It was pretty good from that point of view, but eventually that release got outdated and I discovered that they don't suppose upgrades between major versions.
That's unfortunate indeed. Currently I gravitate towards installing something like Endless OS for either elderly people or children. Automatic atomic updates from the get go on an immutable distro based on Debian Stable; just good stuff. FWIW, it allows updates between major versions as well 😉.
Perhaps we'll give that a try since we're going to have to wipe his computer anyway.. They live quite far away so the top prio is something that won't require me to go there and fix the computer every now and then :)
"By default, most new installations of Endless OS 4, and systems upgraded from older versions of Endless OS, will automatically update to Endless OS 5, and beyond as further versions are released. Systems must be specifically configured to remain on Endless OS 4"
As it even does major updates automatically, it's almost as handsfree as it gets.