The cynicism is well deserved. They have been on 2.99 for years.
That said, I have been using 3.0RC1 for a bit. It ships packaged with my current distro and has worked well for me. This release should be quite usable even though 3.0 has not officially shipped.
“Poor design choice” that comes across at first as a nice feature to end-users is the underlying philosophy in Manjaro.
This is why you have so many fans saying that it is great and that the detractors are wrong. It is also why it has so many passionate detractors.
Manjaro is like a nice car with a canister of TNT attached to it. At first, all you experience is the nice car. If you really like the car, it is easily to feel smarter than the guy who warned you not to drive it. As time goes on, the chances that the TNT explodes goes up. However, it is always possible that your roads are smooth enough that it never blows up for you. Regardless, if you know about the design flaw, recommending such a car to others is really, really bad advice.
Using the AUR with Manjaro is like driving the car above on a gravel road. It does not guarantee that the TNT will go off, but it makes it much more likely.
I hope Manjaro continues to work well for you. Truly.
Also, please do not encourage others to use it.
Manjaro is “Arch derived” but is not Arch. Manjaro maintains its own package repos. And one of the big differences is that the packages in Manjaro are held back a few weeks before release. This difference in base repositories can matter if you try to use the AUR.
In many ways, EOS is not even a distro. It uses the Arch repos unmodified. It uses the Arch kernel unmodified. You could say that EOS is an opinionated Arch installer with pragmatic defaults. EOS has its own repos but there are only handful of packages in them, most of which are optional utilities or theming. Once installed, EOS is essentially Arch. As such, it is 100% compatible with the AUR. Two of the packages in the EOS repos are yay and paru which means the AUR works out of the box (unlike Arch itself).
You may think I am being unfair to EOS. It is my favourite distro. Manjaro is the only distro I warn people not to use.
Yes. Thank you. My question (or point) was how you know that the package needs to be updated? As you point out, I need to do that for dependencies as well.
You are certainly correct though. You can pull AUR packages and build them without yay or paru.
I was thinking mostly of iso images I guess. You are talking about package updates.
First, fair point.
That said, for package updates, are there not Alpine mirrors? You do not need much bandwidth to feed out to the mirrors.
But I agree that, ultimately, they are going to have to find a home for the package repos if they want to directly feed their install base.
As for “the other costs”, those do not seem to have anything to do with their hosting going away.
Um. Ya, I guess. Ok.
First, how do you keep that package up to date?
Real question though is, do you really think that is better than “yay -S AURpackagehere” or even “paru AURpackagehere”?
I still have one of those! Works flawlessly.
I currently have Linux on:
So, you could say that I like Linux on Apple hardware. All of the above is older kit by the way.
I also have Dell and Thinkpad machines but the Apple units are by far my favourite to use.
One thing that certainly sucks though is the soldered on RAM. I have a 2012 MacBook with 16 gigs of RAM (upgraded). My much newer units will never have more than 8.
If you are worried that the script will be malicious, Distrobox does not help.
However, if your main concern is that it is going to make a mess, Distrobox is the perfect solution.
This is the way
Absolutely solid retort that totally addresses what I said on the merits. Also, way to nail the tone. Both hallmarks in debate from people that know they are right.
For anybody reading from the sidelines, most of the “TNT” in my analogy comes from the fact that the Manjaro repos are incompatible with the AUR.
Read both comments and decide for yourself what advice to take. I have offered my warning but do not wish to battle about it.