this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
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There's a lot of reasons people hate on Manjaro, though generally they boil down to instability - despite being on a slower schedule than Arch, a lot of people report worse breakage; their main "testing" is just being a week behind Arch without actually testing much.
Crucially, this can break things when mixing in AUR packages since those are shared w/ Arch and so anything in there that's precompiled against the Arch version of relevant libraries might just break.
It also has considerably deficient security policies, such as the GUI installer
pamacallowing unsuspecting users to trivially install unvetted packages from the AUR without even a clear indication they may be dangerous, and they forgot to update their SSL certificates ~~twice~~ edit: five times (see https://lemmy.ml/comment/1343440), asking users to manually overwrite them as a "fix".Unrelated to desktop, I've also noticed Manjaro staff are quite hostile and unpleasant to work with; I'm involved in a project that works on Linux on mobile devices, and Manjaro's mobile team has been less than the most pleasant. This is a personal gripe for sure and unrelated to the distro itself, but if I'm going to take a dump on Manjaro I'll do it all the way.
As for your other question; you can simply copy the sway config file from the Manjaro install. Either mount the ISO and search there, or if it needs to be installed to populate the sway config, just install in a VM and copy it from there. Necessary packages should be relatively easy to find by just reading the errors sway spits out and googling them.
This....all of it. I started with Arch using Manjaro, like so many do. There was a mass exodus that exploded, and the worst lot remained on the dev team. Beyond that, as you stated, they convice their users that holding back packages is for their benefit, when in reality, your system becomes unstable at times as a result, especially becoming out of sync with AUR. It is still one of the most popular Arch distros, and ...well..I feel sorry for their uninformed users who believe it is a stable choice.
For information sake; Reasons Against Using Manjaro
I used Arch in the past but don't have much time to tinker with my Linux installs anymore, so I switched to Manjaro on most of my devices, hoping to get a balance between low maintenance and access to bleeding edge and AUR ecosystem. I do notice the issues with updates getting delayed more and more in the past few months, and issues with AUR packages getting out of sync like you mentioned.
I wonder if I should start looking into something else. Any recommendation?
Yes, stick with Arch. Arch is not the issue if installed without the holding chambers Manjaro puts in place. Arch has a good installer on its own, but if you need a bit more, distros like EndeavourOS, Calam-Arch-Installer, ALCI (Arch Linux Calamares Installer,) and even Garuda are all fine options.