Is there anybody whose had experience with both?
I’m trying to decide if I want to go back to Manjaro or get into Endeavour.
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Exact same experience 3 years ago. The mistake I did was switching to Manjaro. Actually no. Manjaro is great for learning Arch and to gain the skill doing Arch Vanilla. But maybe its better to instantly go to EndavourOS (no experience with it, but should be similar to pure Arch)
Huh? Installed arch as a complete Linux newbie and have had no problem to this point, except some minor stuff that I can’t be bothered to set up, should I be worried?
As a newbie I couldn’t do Arch because I couldn’t setup a workflow with any Vanilla desktop, thats why I definetly needed something like Pop_OS and Manjaro Gnome with their heavy desktop tweaks, to know and learn what I want. The system was no different, I needed to learn how everything acted to know what to DIY in Arch Vanilla.
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@HouseWolf
No arch is a pain to install it requires you to understand your whole system and can break from the slightest tap.endeavour is based on arch but a lot of work has been done to ensure that noobs can use it for everyday things. so you are basically using someone elses system.
there is a steep learning curve to have a functioning system. if you spend some time on other distros you can transfer the knowledge you gained over to arch
@Ozn
@neurodivergentAF Go with EndeavourOS. I used Manjaro for 1.5 years and a little more. Just switched to EndeavourOS. I’m not listing here all the stuff that Manjaro did wrong, but rather point out a specific problem. Manjaro holding packages is a problem, if you ever use the AUR. Because the packages on the AUR normally expect the newest versions from Archlinux. So the mixture of hold back packages from Manjaro and the newest one from AUR can cause problems. And you can wait weeks before Manjaro updates the packages. And also I personally encountered 2 bugs with the pamac tool (which is recommended over pacman and handles the AUR as well), which one of them I reported and it got fixed.
I switched to EndeavourOS since half a year and don’t have any of these AUR concerns. The distro maintainer aren’t doing any obvious stupid stuff as well. It’s closer to real Archlinux and overall feels great.
I’ve been on Manjaro for about 1.5 years now too. I switched over to the Unstable branch a while back, which fixed this issue for me. This branch seems to be getting all packages at the same speed as regular Arch. Plus, I still get the Manjaro-specific kernels, access to their repos, integrated pamac, etc. For now, I’m sticking with Manjaro this way.
i’ve been using manjaro on an olderl desktop at the office, and in a vm at home, for a couple years now. i’ve never had an issue with it on either. i’ve used it enough to prefer onlyoffice now, over the other free msoffice alternatives.
Endeavor seems like a better option. The majaro devs don’t seem particularly trustworthy as OS devs, mainly because they hold back security updates as a policy and have allowed things like ssl certs to lapse multiple times. Endeavor gets you the benefits Manjaro provides without the nonsense.
Nobody has mentioned the guided installer that now ships with the vanilla Arch iso:
archinstallI’ve done the Arch installation from scratch a few times to add some inches to my e-peen, but the CLI installer does everything so nicely that I haven’t bothered with a manual install for a while now.
I generally choose gnome (wayland), and add
pamac-nosnapfrom the AUR, and it’s a super user friendly experience. Especially if you choose to use BTRFS during the install and then setuptimeshiftand add thetimeshift-autosnappackage once you are in the DE. For the handful of times I’ve ever had an issue with a package update, I just roll back to a previous snapshot and I’m back in action.After migrating from Solus a while ago I tried Manjaro, but quickly decided Endeavour OS seemed better. I mostly wanted Arch with some sane defaults so I think it was a better fit for me. However, I think plain Arch is also a strong contender despite IMO more annoying setup. I have had some issues with keys not syncing properly from the EOS repository.
Endeavour is as close as you can get to pure Arch with a GUI installer + pretty neat QOL features OOTB (reflector to update mirrors, the AUR’s already installed and ready to go, etc). 90% of what applies to vanilla Arch applies to Endeavour when it comes to fixes, and the community is super helpful and friendly in my experience. It’s kinda light on stuff when compared to other ready to go Linux Distros, but hey, that just means less pre-installed apps you either never use or have to uninstall
Manjaro is an Arch based distro that kinda sucks at being an Arch based distro (essentially, the updates are held back by a couple of weeks for better and worse, WIP packages sometimes slip through to the repos and can cause problems to your system, and you can forget about using the AUR–or well, you can, but the AUR and Manjaro are nortorious for not playing nice with one another). Troubleshooting the thing tested my patience personally, because like someone else here said: it basically found a unique way to break itself every time I updated the system and I just got…tired, eventually. Manjaro also comes with basically everything you could possibly need pre-installed and then some, so that’s neat if you’re not in the mood to hunt down all your apps.
If you’re cool with using the terminal to update, install stuff (or you could also install pamac or Octopi, nothing’s stopping you, and it works) and troubleshoot, try Endeavour. You can make it exactly like Manjaro without the defects with a bit of work if you want
If you don’t mind being extra careful with what you install (really that’s standard practice, but hey, I’ve never found a WIP package anywhere other than Manjaro, so make of that what you will), are willing to tolerate constant mild to severe breakage, and just using Flatpaks and appimages over the AUR, go with Manjaro
went from manjaro to endevour (both kde). for me personally, there wasnt much difference, just less stuff preinstalled (bloat?) on endevouros.
EndeavourOS is basically Arch with a nice installer and a few extra QoL packages while Manjaro manages their own repositories and adds things like mhwd that change system management to be a little different than Arch.
I much prefer Endeavour since I already do everything from the command line anyway. Also, while most info about Arch applies to Manjaro it doesn’t always and I found that very annoying when trying to troubleshoot.
I’ve also installed Arch a few times and it went fine, but the Endeavour installer is a much nicer experience.
i have tried both endeavour is much more stable try manjaro for a few years am using endeavour os for almost a year its much better and gives less issues
I was expecting the responses to be more mixed. But pretty much the issues I see here confirms to me that Manjaro is not the winner. I think Endeavour is going to be the one I will install.
EndeavourOS is my preference. I appreciate that they don’t really modify the Arch experience in any annoying way. Manjaro seems to always break shit. Plus the EOS forums are amazing.
I used manjaro first but after hearing about the incompatance of the devs I made the switch to endeavor.
To justify, they’ve ddosed the aur accidentally twice, their lead arm dev pushed a commit to the asahi kernal that broke half of the users installs, they tried shipping that kernal while it was very much in development with a broken kernal which couldn’t actually run while pretending that “manjaro runs on the m1 macbook” (this could have broken users hardware), and they don’t properly tell users the dangers of the aur like the time a guy put two calls to an IP logger beside a list of people who can fuck themselves or an on init fork bomb. This should not be a toggle directly next to snaps and flat packs, which are safer than a normal package.
they don’t properly tell users the dangers of the aur like the time a guy put two calls to an IP logger beside a list of people who can fuck themselves or an on init fork bomb. This should not be a toggle directly next to snaps and flat packs, which are safer than a normal package.
Flatpaks or snaps are not safer at all, as the package maintainer decides how much sandboxing, if any, is applied by default. Manjaro also very much does have a warning in the settings page for the AUR…
Not safer than the aur? Where you run a random script from some random guy who is likely unassociated with the project which has very little chance of being audited?
Or a normal package? Which has no sandboxing at all. In that case, yes, one could have a poorly sandboxes app, but the vast majority have some to a larger amount of sandboxing. On top of that, they come from a much more heavily audited place than the aur. It is, on average, safer than the average normally packaged package. Some sandboxing is better than no sandboxing
And no, their warning is not nearly enough. They should state that a person needs to read any package build script before installation and its diff while updating unless they verify the packager is the project maintainer for the application they use
Where you run a random script from some random guy who is likely unassociated with the project which has very little chance of being audited?
Until recently, most Flatpaks were also published by random people and you had no easy way of verifying who they were.
In that case, yes, one could have a poorly sandboxes app, but the vast majority have some to a larger amount of sandboxing
That is not a usable argument for security. The app developer sets how much sandboxing their app gets, so if they want your data, they can get it.
And sure, you can restrict permissions yourself if you want, but that’s not what any normal user does.
@Zamundaaa Flatpaks are not installed with sudo rights. That’s a huge difference.
It does not make a real difference in practice. Outside of the server space, the most important thing a user has is not access to their root filesystem but access to their home folder - to their data and fun things like .bashrc and .profile that allow to hijack pretty much everything the user runs
As someone who tried both, I think Endevour is better. 1.It’s more bleeding edge. 2. It’s as close to vanilla Arch as you can get with a gui installer. 3. The dev team seems to be more compitent then the Manjaro team (i.e: shit doesn’t break because someone pushed a WIP package). 4. Better community support (I mean, it’s literally just Arch with a fancy installer).
They’re both fairly easy to install. And it’s fairly easy to switch between the two.
It’s really not that hard to follow the wiki to install Arch. I feel like there’s a lot of maintaining to do when using Arch, so you might as well get used to the terminal. It wasn’t really an issue when I was using it daily, but has become a chore now that I boot up my laptop once or twice a month.
Funnily enough, I’m always on my Steam Deck now and that is based on Arch, too.
Is it? I thought SteamOS was based on Debian
Since SteamOS 3 it’s based on Arch
I did not know that. Thanks!
@slampisko Also with the next big update of SteamOS to 3.5 they will even integrate Nix package system officially! That means you can install packages in a persistent manner (not just Flatpaks).
There’s a years old Debian-based version available for download, but the version that ships on Steam Deck is significantly different and based on Arch.
You have to remember that most people aren’t power users. A lot of people find if difficult to even install Windows. Vanilla Arch isn’t for everybody.
Honestly, in that case, I can’t recommend Arch to those users. Nothing wrong with Ubuntu for beginners and there’s so much documentation.
I have switched from manjaro to endeavouros about a month ago. I definitely prefer endeavouros. However, the kernel install GUI in manjaro was nice, made it very easy to get an overview of the available kernels and which ones are still getting support.
