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.

There are multiple types of people “hating” Manjaro to various degrees.

There are the “It GoEs AgAinsT ThE ArCh PhiLoSopHy” guys - those you should ignore without a second thought. Because duh, that’s why it’s its own distro and not Arch. They probably also hate Endeavor, Garuda and all the other great Arch based distros and have no idea what they are talking about.

There are the ones who, like myself, tried Manjaro briefly, realized there was something broken right out of the box, thought “lol stable my ass” and then invested way too much time in Arch on another distro. You should ignore us as well.

There are the ones who at least claim to have proberly used Manjaro for a while and say there is no noticeable benefit, if not disadvantages. They might have a point (shout out the the guy or gal who mentioned their frequent certificate fails lmao).

And finally there are those who have decided Manjaro just isn’t for them and moved on. They can probably give an actually balanced and fair review of Manjaro.

But then again, there are also people maintaining and liking the project, so there seems to be at the very least some perceived value to it. Maybe it’s worth it, maybe it isn’t. Frankly, I don’t care whether people this distro. And why should I?

I also don’t get why a couple dozen DEs exist, when I hate everything but Plasma and Cinnamon, maybe GNOME. But if people want to use them and go as far as to maintain them, there is probably a reason and I have better things to do than stop them.

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 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 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.

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.

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’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.

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

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.

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

Lots of people hate it just because it’s popular and accessible. Some of them are trolls, some of them are being trolled.

All of them rely on lofty argument that have no real bearing for pragmatic use of the distro.

I love Manjaro :)

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.