Linux

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 pamac allowing 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.

On mobile Linux, Manjaro is the reason dont-ship.it exists. They distributed untested and WIP GitHub patches to their users, which understandably broke stuff. And users would then go to the project to report bugs.

I've had this site given as reason a few times though I myself feel it's rather overblown and feels more like a personal vendetta for some reason:

https://manjarno.snorlax.sh/

For what it's worth I've used Manjaro myself and rather liked it. Never had a problem.

There are multiple types of people "hating" Manjaro to various degrees.

There are the "It GoEs AgAinsT ThE ArCh PhiLoSopHy" guys - those you should ignore without a second thought. Because duh, that's why it's its own distro and not Arch. They probably also hate Endeavor, Garuda and all the other great Arch based distros and have no idea what they are talking about.

There are the ones who, like myself, tried Manjaro briefly, realized there was something broken right out of the box, thought "lol stable my ass" and then invested way too much time in Arch on another distro. You should ignore us as well.

There are the ones who at least claim to have proberly used Manjaro for a while and say there is no noticeable benefit, if not disadvantages. They might have a point (shout out the the guy or gal who mentioned their frequent certificate fails lmao).

And finally there are those who have decided Manjaro just isn't for them and moved on. They can probably give an actually balanced and fair review of Manjaro.

But then again, there are also people maintaining and liking the project, so there seems to be at the very least some perceived value to it. Maybe it's worth it, maybe it isn't. Frankly, I don't care whether people this distro. And why should I?

I also don't get why a couple dozen DEs exist, when I hate everything but Plasma and Cinnamon, maybe GNOME. But if people want to use them and go as far as to maintain them, there is probably a reason and I have better things to do than stop them.

These are the reasons people hate Manjaro: https://manjarno.snorlax.sh/

I've used Manjaro for a while and my system broke twice in that time just by updating my system (And with "broke" I mean it didn't boot anymore). Then I switched to EndeavourOS and I haven't had that issue once. Been using that for over 2 years now.

In short, there have been key signing issues multiple times in the past that. That were the most notable problems from the user side.

Running three instances with KDE that are unproblematic.

I've never used Manjaro but the perception I get from it is that it is a noob friendly distro with good GUI and config (good) but then catastrophically fails when monkeying around with updates and the AUR. This is a pain for technical users and a back-to-Windows experience for the people it's targeted towards. Overall, significantly worse than EndeavorOS or plain 'ol vanilla Arch Linux.

First of all, the settings: you can boot up a Manjaro machine and copy the .config/sway/config and whatever other files it might be referencing (another config in /etc maybe?). Then it is just a matter of installing the dependencies like the referenced themes and tools(= any programs listed for shortcuts) in there and you should be able to get the same setup, unless Manajro people set GTK themes outside of sway or sth... Feel free to comment once you hit that wall :)

As to why Manjaro is widely criticized: they delay all updates by some time for a false sense of stability (I think two weeks) which is often considered to make no sense since it delays bugs, but also their fixes. Then there is some general philosophical disagreement between them and the Arch community since Manajro breaks Arch's DIY and learning principles by being ready to use out of the box. This is mainly because they include all kinds of stuff which also makes the distro considered bloated. In the end, one big advice to give right from the start: searching for help in Arch forums as a Manjaro user is rarely tolerated, if you run Arco, your problem will likely be accepted though.

Hope it helps!

I used Manjaro for a while. Twice I had updates break stuff so thoroughly that I had to reinstall the OS entirely. The second time, I installed Pop OS instead and it's been smooth sailing since.

They let their SSL certificate expire so many times that it became a meme. If I remember correctly it has happened four times.

Just set a fucking reminder lol.

I used to use Manjaro when I first transitioned to Linux from Windows. I think it's okay. Their mission makes sense, when you consider the grub-crashing that happened a few months ago, Manjaro wasn't affected.

I wasn't aware people hated Manjaro. I don't really have a distro of Linux that I hate. I have some that I prefer over others for certain reasons but anything open source is a-okay with me in the larger scale of things.

I thought Manjaro was great when I ran it (switched to Silverblue which works well for me).

The only annoying thing was taking forever to update plasma one time.

I don't necessarily hate Manjaro, but I do think people shouldn't use it. Besides the things people have already said, Manjaro goes against the spirit of what Arch is supposed to be. Arch has everything you want and nothing you don't. You set everything up for yourself so you know exactly how your system works and why X package is installed. You tailor the experience for yourself rather than having someone else tailor it for you. If you wanted that you could just use a distro meant for that in the first place like Fedora.

But even if you really, really, want preconfigured Arch you could just use EndeavourOS. It uses the normal Arch repos and has basically none of the issues Manjaro has in terms of security and stability. There is not really any good reason to use Manjaro over it.

I don't get it either. I've been using it on some older laptops because I wanted something lighter weight. It works well for me.

The only reason I heard of people hating Manjaro is because of the main developer ... But for me is because it breaks more often than Arch

Lots of people hate it just because it's popular and accessible. Some of them are trolls, some of them are being trolled.

All of them rely on lofty argument that have no real bearing for pragmatic use of the distro.

I love Manjaro :)

I use arch because i like to do research mess with things and is fun, manjaro that's what i would suggest anyone moving to Linux it's just that good of a distro to use and mostly sre trolls so let them be.