Manjaro

The Manjaro Team curates updates to their Arch-based distro to maximize stability while remaining rolling. Works flawlessly on Intel & AMD GPUs, but can be tricky on hybrid video laptops. v19 hopes to correct that with the updated calamares installer.

Bautiful Desktop in top of a bautiful Basis (Arch)

Over the past 10 years I have used many distributions, from Arch to Zorin to LFS. I use higher end hardware and I need an OS that can keep up with my needs. My machine is used primarily with The Godot Game Engine, Blender, GIMP, and Krita, so it needs to take some punishment. Along with using the KDE Desktop with all of its bells and whistles, I couldn't be happier with Manjaro. Loving it for about a year now.

The best distro, aside from Ubuntu MATE (I use Manjaro MATE), that I have ever used. I wonder, after 11 years of Ubuntu, why I didn't switch over 5 years ago. Ubuntu (or, rather, Canonical) has removed apps on which I had come to depend, and every one of them is available with the Arch repos, and, of course, the AUR.

Best Distro ever

Manjaro is a great Linux distro for anyone who wants a stable Arch variant. It's not as cutting edge as Arch, but you may still find it's a little buggy, or rough around the edges in some of the community editions. You can push the envelope in Manjaro with the versions of packages you are installing, as well, so overall it makes a great desktop for people who would consider themselves intermediate to advanced Linux users. I have experienced some installer issues in the past, but apart from that it's usually been pretty good for me.

Seems like a more stable Arch, which is easier to install.

Since Manjaro is rolling release, you would be well advised to stick to their XFCE edition, which is a highly stable, slowly-changing desktop, albeit a bit behind the times.

I used Manjaro (the i3 edition which I then installed openbox and qtile on) on my main production machine for most of 2018 without any issues. I also am currently running Manjaro on one of my laptops. Installation is a breeze. Maintaining the system is essentially the same as maintaining Arch (or other rolling release distros). And the Manjaro community is very welcoming.

Jason from Forbes is spot on with his assessment of Manjaro as the ultimate gaming distro. It just works - everything you need to game via Steam is installed from the get-go. Not only that, but the XFCE DE makes it lightning fast. I'm dual booting with Windows for non-Proton compatible games and it's quite apparent when I boot into Windows as opposed to Manjaro. Big Picture opens instantly on Linux. Hard to beat this one if you want to play games.

A very very well-maintained distro based on Arch but with it's own repos. It is both held back and more bleeding edge than Arch at the same time; the devs have chosen to have the absolute latest releases of the following desktops: Xfce4, Gnome, Plasma. This means that they very often are ahead of Arch. Yet at the same time non-de files are held back up to two weeks to ensure stability. Now, personally, I think they are deliberately moving away from the Arch philosophy; they have started an official partnership with Canonical and are from this release (18.1) including both snap support and an actual snap STORE. Long story short I am still recommending this to anyone that wants a rolling release but personally I am moving back closer to Arch (trying my luck with Endeavour OS).

Its very nice to install it but requires huge maintenance costs. You need to keep track about the updates yourself, and need to read the forums all the time to see if an update is save to do. Also the updates are huge, all the time and nobody can tell when the next update is there.

User-friendly Arch distro. I like it for its flexibility and relative light-weightness. However, it does not feel as polished as Ubuntu or Mageia or openSUSE. And it is pretty limited when it comes to interesting features such as Snap or KVM-support or snapper etc.

very stable, and beautiful distro.

Still my favorite Desktop distro, specially their xfce variant, it's very easy to customize (not to mention their community selection of DEs, and Manjaro architect), and it's the distro with the best gaming performance I've tried so far (being openSUSE a close second). While I do think their software manager UI needs a bit of work (it sometimes crashes when upgrading packages), it's an overall very stable distribution and I heavily recommend it for new linux users.

Been using KDE version for 18 months. Few problems. Occasional update needs a hard boot. Had an issue I couldn't fix via internet, solved it via the manjaro forum.

Been distro hopping for quite a while untol I landed on Manjaro+KDE. Never looked back...

The KDE version seemed nice, I thought I'd try the XFCE version, which broke on the first update..... Issues n Tissues with this. There are so many other Arch-based distro's that work properly out there.

I am using it since a couple of years on two computers with both free and non-free graphics and KDE desktop and it's working like a charm. I was looking for a semi-rolling release model as I want the latest software. Good advice is to read through the update announcements on https://forum.manjaro.org/ before doing a larger update. That way it kept working flawlessly so far :-)

One of the best Desktops that can be used as both. Server and Desktop . Best way to learn Desktop on arch .

I am really impressed by this distro. I am using it for more than a year and everything runs great. Very responsive forum and devs.

Gives a great i3 desktop out of the box

Ran with this distro for about a year. All in all it is a very nice distro. XFCE make it very flexible and fairly slim. It also works well with Mac computers. However, I finally switched to Solus due to updates corrupting my install in a way I could not for the life of me fix. It might have been better since then (2017/18). But at the moment I can only give it 3 out of 5.

Great rolling release for gamers and people going straight from Windows, although, you really WANT to read their forum posts about updates, because there's a list of all problems you can encounter after the update, usually with recommended fixes. For this reason I wouldn't recommend it for complete beginners.

(Xfce) Nice features and a good look and feel. Impresses this writer as being a distro somewhat inclined toward gaming and better Microsoft compatibility. Not really a good choice for one who has a low tolerance for unannounced failures. Notwithstanding, the distro holds much promise. A few suggestions: 1) As with Arch, enable both color and verbose package lists in pacman. This can be accomplished via the pacman.conf file. 2) The package "sl" is a must install (in any distro). 3) If one doesn't care to have location info being transmitted to the web upon request, it would be wise to disable the "geoclue" service.

I wanted to really like this distro, but everytime I have used it, it has failed in the first few days to weeks. I know lots of people have used it and love it, but the fact that packages are held back from its core Arch it can cause issues, mainly if you use the AUR (which has almost every app you can think of available for Linux). Also unless using the architech version there is Too Much Bloatware, but that is true of a lot of distros.

Decent distro for hobbyists but not stable enough for use in a real production environment.

Very nice distro, I have been running it at home and at work for 3 years now. Manjaro is a good distro but has it little weird parts. Reading the forum on an update is sometimes required.

One of the best desktops I've used that's based on Arch .

This is the one that ended my own personal distrohopping. Manjaro is Arch based but much more newcomer friendly. Installation, default applications etc. Putting up proprietary drivers is a breeze. Manjaro also holds back packages for some time for added stability; on Manjaro, against somewhat common opinion, it's not a bad thing to "hold back" some. By holding back releases a bit, any immediate issues like a TYPO that prevents the desktop environment from working are avoided. Say, an issue breaks your system because of your rare graphics card, and Arch fixes it in an hour or two. If you got the immediate update, your system is already broken, and you either have to fix it the hard way, using another device to Google documentation or help, or "nuke and pave". In my experience Manjaro is the #1 distro of the rolling release model. Fresh yet very very stable still.

Take's everything great about Arch and then ruins it. Arch proper users despise this distro with good reason, because when we can't replicate an error we have to ask if it's really Arch or Manjaro.... it's always Manjaro.