I am a Linux noobie and have only used Mint for around six months now. While I have definitely learned a lot, I don’t have the time to always be doing crazy power user stuff and just want something that works out of the box. While I love Mint, I want to try out other decently easy to use distros as well, specifically not based on Ubuntu, so no Pop OS. Is Manjaro a possibly good distro for me to check out?
Really? Which packages are you actually missing in Arch? I like Fedora and used it extensively in the past, but it has always devolved into a wild mess of COPR repos. I haven’t had the same issue with Arch and I use the AUR very sparingly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Linux_distributions#Package_management_and_installation
Has an overview. Debian’s binary package repository has more than ten times more packages, and Fedora more than five times.
I have been using Manjaro in the past and the lack of available binary packages from the trusted main repo was often a problem.
Since switching to Fedora I only very rarely encounter missing packages and have not once used COPR (but I do use Flatpack on the desktop).
No, I am asking the packages that you personally are missing. I don’t think raw package counts are the way to determine whether one distro is offering more software than another. Arch frequently will bundle software in a bigger packages while other distros will split them up into sub-packages, artificially inflating the count.
Tbh I’ve experienced the exact opposite of what you experienced, but it may just be down to our individual software needs. For example, Discord, Signal, and Yuzu are nowhere to be found in the Fedora repos, whereas they’re available in the main Arch repos. Likewise, things like codec support often require RPMFusion, but in Arch it’s just available right out of the gate.
I don’t remember which ones exactly I was missing, but it was a very common occurrence that I had to work around with appimages or flatpacks (or AUR, but that caused dependency hell all the time).
RPMfusion is a one time addition on system installation and the rest is available via Flathub, which is significantly better integrated in Fedora than Manjaro/Arch.
But one that you have to manage with every new Fedora version. I’ve always had issues with RPMFusion packages not being ready in time for new Fedora releases or flat out causing conflicts with packages from the main Fedora repos.
That is just simply not true. As long as you have the
flatpakpackage installed, it works just like it does on Fedora.I get the feeling that maybe you just haven’t tried Arch in a while, but perhaps a lot has changed since the last time you used it.