It has been my main distro for years now,
and I have only enjoyed the experience.
2 points you'll likely mention which do not make it a bad distro:
The certificate of their website expired twice
If you use AUR packages,
sometimes you need to wait with an update since they hold back official repo packages for a few weeks to ensure stability, which AUR packages might depend on.
Stop the distro hate,
it divides the Linux community...
Instead we should unify against M$/iFruit,
and let people use whatever distro they like.
Which imo makes it a good distro,
idiots would not make a good distro..
Sure the people behind it made some doubtful decisions in the past, but that doesn't change the fact that using it has been a bliss.
Additionally, it's all open source,
so if they would ever turn anti-consumer,
it can be forked into another distro.
As I mentioned earlier, stop the distro hate.
I'm not throwing acquisitions against other distros, instead I let people enjoy whatever flavor of Linux they desire...
By now I helped a fair amount of Arch and other distro users through Lemmy / AUR / Issues, and I also learned a fair amount of Arch / Manjaro and other distro users.
Linux is not the enemy here,
not a single flavor..
I still see no point of using Manjaro when it's still basically crippled Arch. Why not use Arch itslef? If installation is too much, there's archinstal or EndeavourOS. It's just puzzling to me.
To clear it up, I don't use either of them. But if I had to pick, I'd go with Endeavour much rather than Manjaro.
I went with Manjaro due to the way they do their package releases.
Arch is bleeding edge,
a double edged sword if you ask me,
all the latest versions,
and all the bugs that come along with them.
I'm looking for stability in my daily driver though.
Manjaro keeps releases a few weeks back on their stable branch.
And tests the releases first on their unstable and testing branches.
Resulting in near bleeding edge with enhanced stability on the stable branch.
i also love endeavour, after a year of sometimes random distros but mostly arch (installed incorrectly cause i cant find a tutorial with everything), endeavour allows us to get arch without worrying at all about 'some hidden config you forgot to change and now your clock is broken for the 5th time and you have to reinstall everything cause syncing it again just seems to not work'
Manjaro offers a stable branch, pamac, upgrade snapshots, package manager, kernel manager, driver manager, and is optimized for LTS kernels. It takes a lot of the edge off Arch.
If that's not something you need that's fine. Some of us do.
They avoid releasing packages with outstanding bugs. So at least there's that.
As for AUR... it's really not a standard for stability in any shape or form. Heck, if AUR packages really didn't work on Manjaro that would definitely improve its stability. 😄
But that's really not proven (that they don't work). All the ones I tried worked fine. YMMV. A third of AUR packages are abandoned or have never been updated after being added. There is no quality bar beyond "some random person decided to add a package". I really don't think we should use the AUR as proof of anything.