Can you elaborate on the "miles better" thing? I'm very close to provisioning several Linux machines. My home server is using Manjaro and has been rock-solid for 2.5 years now.
As someone who just switched to Endeavor on my desktop recently, I appreciate that it feels like the right amount of "you have all the power and options" that Arch promises, but also has the sort of "It just works out of the box" that I had with Ubuntu/Fedora.
The AUR is so nice, as you know. Not having to really mess around with Snap vs. Flatpak and the like and just using yay or pacman to get everything is amazing.
I'm not sure how much better it is than Manjaro, but it's just good. It feels like I could dive into doing things the hardcore Arch way any time I wanted, but also provides the UX tools to do most of the same things if you want the more simple option with some guardrails.
RE: your last paragraph, I do the same with Manjaro and I don't feel that you differentiated EndeavourOS (or Arch) at all.
In this entire thread several people basically say "Arch > Manjaro" and proceed to use the word "feel" multiple times which -- as I'm sure you can see -- is not a compelling and logical emotionless argument.
I've messed around on a Manjaro machine a lot and only broke it once (and I knew that I did so, it wasn't a random problem). It seems that nobody can answer clearly and differentiate one distro in favor of another. :|
Sure, and that's why I didn't claim Arch or Endeavour was better than Manjaro. I was just pointing out why I like it. A lot of this is gonna be subjective to what you want - under the hood, almost all of them are essentially the same, or could be made to be the same if you wanted.
- I had another poster say Arch is "flexible" -- as if Manjaro straight up disallows you to install new software? -- and I got confused what do they mean.
- Another one said too much software is installed by Manjaro out of the box and this is something that I half-agree with, but I still prefer that to Arch where you are booted to a root terminal and you are supposed to figure out how to make a basic functioning system (and I don't find that "having a root terminal in VGA mode on a blinding display contrast" constitutes "a basic functioning system").
- I think another one (but not on this thread) said they're not okay with Manjaro pre-setting some desktop environment visuals and settings for you. I super strongly disagree with them though, for reasons outlined below.
In general I spotted some tinge of elitism. It is strange to me that this still exists in 2023. A lot of us "the nerds" that tinkered with computers since teenagers are 40+ now and our work-life-hobby balance is tilting more and more towards the "life" part, so I personally prefer a system that gives me a working desktop environment with sensible defaults and yes, some extra software that I might not need, because after that me as an experienced programmer can clean up the machine to the extent I'd feel comfortable calling it "minimal" (always a subjective term, of course).
Oh, let's not even mention MHWD. I'd throw my hands in the air and never use Linux again -- very likely -- if that didn't exist. But I might be a bit extreme here, I hear that a good amount of distros have high-quality hardware detectors and automatic (at OS installing time, I mean) installers of the right drivers / kernel modules. But for now I am not keen on going out of my comfortable zone to experiment.
Yea, my read is that Endeavour and Manjaro are fairly similar in goals and user-friendliness. In general, I think Manjaro is perhaps a bit more opinionated in terms of UX and general stuff I've heard about the maintainers and their packaging opinions, while Endeavour feels a bit more like "Arch but with some presets and helpers".
I had problems with manjaro in regards to package updates and kernel management. As I understood, manjaro uses pacman in a weird way by wrapping it with pamac. Pamac was unable, at least for me, to update/install a single specific package without updating the whole system first. This made daily usage a living hell, because packages that are built from source can make a "htop" installation last 30 mins. On the other hand, yay is by far the best package manager I've ever used.
EDIT: Also, supposedly, Manjaro team has some management issues.
What will EndeavourOS do better?