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.

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.

I wouldn’t say I hate Manjaro, but I had a bad first experience with it.

They put Material Shell in the default install. The project devs at the time described the project as alpha or beta quality and it was. It had some easy to find bad bugs.

https://github.com/material-shell/material-shell

I trusted Manjaro to but stable software in the default install and they let me down.

This was for a family member and I didn’t up using Ubuntu instead, which has worked fine.

Main devs and is cluttered, there are better alternatives like EndeavourOS.

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'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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Part of it is the same reason that Debian users bash Ubuntu or Mint users. Why use a derivative when the original works well?

That is a bit superficial, though. Debian isn't ideal for everybody and neither is Arch. I've used Manjaro before. I like the installation process for general desktop use. Easy and straightforward. People who are used to graphical OS installers may be put off by Arch's approach. I don't distrohop personally and stick with Arch (btw), so OS installation is a one time headache for every device and archinstall is doable. I think the Arch installation process can be a sort of insider shibboleth for self-identifying linux badasses and a graphical install (for them) is missing the point of Arch. Whatever.

I saw a few posts on edditRay that critiqued the Manjaro team for failing to renew SSL certificates one or more times. That may have led to a perception that the team is not competent to run a distro, which seems like a very harsh position to take.

Also, Manjaro holds back updates from time to time for further testing/stability. This goes against the point of a rolling release distro to an extent, since you aren't technically getting the very latest software. The tradeoff may make sense for you, though.

You can try copying over your dotfiles if you switch to Arch or Arco. That might be a good start for the overall layout. You might need to install any extra packages used by manjaro in addition to sway for icons, menus, power management, backgrounds, etc.

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 use Monjaro at work for my airgapped laptop, because it was the only modern distro that didn't use Xfce and worked on the T40. I don't hate it, but I also can't ever see myself using it as my daily driver. If you do use it as your daily and like it, cool. If you don't use it or you hate it, cool. For me, all the different distros is the point of Linux, as it allows everyone to tailor the experience to their liking, while still being (mostly) compatibility with each other.

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.

Arch is about DIY approach. Arch derivatives for "making it easy" are a joke because they defeat the whole point of doing it yourself

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.

I tried it on pinephone and laptop. Both had 2 different updates break the OS. Both needed to be reinstalled each time.

Not worth it. Poor quality. Go arch or OpenSuse.

Just use Manjaro, it's a great distro. I switched from Arch a few years ago because Arch kept changing the tools from the installer so every time I had to read the wiki to know how to install it, and that's not fun.

In general people don't like Manjaro because it's a week behind Arch, so if you install things from the AUR you're likely to break stuff (although that has never happened to me, it is a possibility). Also because since it's simple to install a lot of people without technical knowledge have started using it and they say they use Arch, so they get replies which assumed they read the wiki, and they get angry, which makes them seem more annoying, which makes the whole thing escalate.