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?

  • @humdrumgentleman
    1•1 year ago

    I have other thoughts, but these are the most objective ones:

    • The theme was integrated with all applications I tried and I didn’t spot any problems with it. (I’d tell you I liked it, but that would be subjective)
    • Installing via Pamac required knowing what source (repos, AUR, et cetera) you were installing from or to try multiple.
    • My Brother wifi printer couldn’t connect and I didn’t find a guide to resolve it.
    • I couldn’t get audio to work correctly on my Thinkpad X1 Carbon 9th Gen.
    • The forums seemed to be active.
    • I ran it for a week in a VM without breaking anything. Didn’t run for any length of time on bare metal due to the printer and sound issues.

    Compared to Fedora and EndeavorOS:

    • Default GNOME theming, of course also through.
    • GNOME Store will show you all available sources when you search for the package on Fedora. For EndeavorOS I have to search two places on archlinux.org and flathub.
    • My printer worked with Fedora out of the box. For EndeavorOS I found a detailed guide they put together.
    • No audio issues on either.
    • Fedora also has a large forum. The EndeavorOS forum seems to have fewer users.
    • I ran Fedora on my laptop for 6 months. When I upgraded between versions, I ended up with two versions of some applications like “Terminal” and “GNOME Terminal,” which was confusing. No breakages.
    • I’ve been running EndeavorOS for 14 months. I broke GRUB when everyone else on Arch and EndeavorOS did. I still had the live USB, and EndeavorOS provided instructions on how to fix it, although it was written for Ext4 and I had to make some educated guesses since I use BTRFS. I was successful and that was my only breakage.