• lemmyvore@feddit.nl
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    7 months ago

    Can you elaborate on why you think they suck? IMO most of the Arch derivates fill very good roles. Arch itself is a nice distro but you can never suit every user, and the derivates do things that Arch itself would never do.

    Most importantly I believe there are lots of people who would have never used Arch vanilla but they get to enjoy “second hand Arch” and that’s a good thing, isn’t it?

    My take on the most prominent Arch derivates (forgive me if I forget any, it’s off the top of my head):

    • Endeavour has a rapid GUI installer. It may seem like a small thing but sometimes you don’t want to go through an uber-customizable multi-hour install process. It’s not a beginner vs advanced thing; seasoned users can also want to save time. This installer goes against the Arch goal of providing full install customization so it will probably never be in Arch, but it is useful.
    • Garuda goes one step further and offers lots of optimizations out of the box. As great as it is to have complete freedom to configure your system sometimes you want a distro to step in and do it for you.
    • Manjaro goes in another direction and attempts to be “stable Arch”. That may sound like a wierd thing to do with a rolling distro but it works suprisingly well. The catch is that in doing so it sacrifices a lot of what makes Arch Arch; it has a “mommy knows best” approach and tells the user to not customize their system too much. This of course is complete Arch heresy (which probably explains all the rage against it). But I think it has struck a good niche as “Arch for the lazy” – people who would like a rolling distro but are afraid of bleeding edge.
    • LovePoson@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      Pretty much, yeah. Definitely agree with you on that one. I use Manjaro mostly bc im lazy to install regular arch and also bc I actually found that delay in the update cycle to be really good in my case. With regular arch the times I used it broke a lot more than what Manjaro ever did for me, and I’m not that particularly interested in “bleeding edge” that much, but instead I liked arch and arch based distros because of the compatibility and tools I need. The AUR is amazing, and there’s tons of custom repos to be added on top of arch which give me said tools I need to use + (yeah im lazy as hell).

      So yeah, Manjaro is pretty much a bit of a more stable arch for lazy people, so right up my alley!

    • Allero@lemmy.today
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      7 months ago

      Happy Manjaro user here. “Mommy knows best” approach greatly helps to get onboard with Linux without shooting yourself in the foot.

      If I would be offered to start my journey with Arch, I just wouldn’t begin this transition to begin with.

      And now, I can enjoy a lot of benefits of Arch, be it rolling release, independence, AUR (carefully though), from the comfort of a nice and easy to understand system designed with regular user in mind.

    • ghostblackout@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      Endeavour is ok I just did like it that much I like that wallpapers

      Garuda gave up on it in the installer like the look those jelly window should never be on by default and my ThinkPad Just Said No when I tried to install it I have a t480 I was testing it on there before I put it on my main pc

      Manjaro I never got it to work properly just unstable there package installer is worse then discover (discover is not bad I just can’t get it working when I install it)

      I’m fine with people using arch bases distros I just don’t use them and I won’t force backs arch on anyone

      • someonesmall@lemmy.ml
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        7 months ago

        Can you elaborate what didn’t work on Manjaro? Just curious, I’ve been using it on my gaming rig for over 5 years without problems.