It’s great to see this project still going strong after many years. For me, Manjaro struck the perfect balance between stability and new features. The community is also one of my favorite things about it. For anyone finding Ubuntu too bloated and Arch too hard to install/maintain, Manjaro is the way to go. You’ll get the best of both worlds.

This is so interesting to me. When I switched to daily driving Linux, I started with Ubuntu, then switched to Manjaro. I found Manjaro to be closer to the worst of both worlds. Mostly following arch, but delayed (without testing, really). I think I tried right when it had one of it's major fiascos a few years back which left a bad taste in my mouth. I've found Endeavor to be closer to what I was looking for in Manjaro (Arch with a better installer and helpful defaults) but have since settled with OpenSUSE for all of my computers now.

I think I just used Manjaro at an unfortunate time. If I ever needed to go back to an Arch like system perhaps I would try it again. I see so many people speaking highly of it so I suspect my experience isn't representative.

I switched from Windows to Arch to Manjaro last week. Manjaro feels better for me, while letting me do most of the Arch things I wanted in plain Arch. There are some minor nitpicks like not having "make" or "patch" installed by default, but I guess if they expect you to use their own Package/App Manager you technically wouldn't need it. One complaint/frustration about Linux in-general has been Audio issues. My Behringer 204HD caused some headaches plus has to learn which audio pipeline works different in what way. Right now swimming along nicely, just some crashes when playing games.