I share this concern. Their own treasurer raised a concern as to whether community donated funds were handled according to the process they had put in place. For a period of time while this was happening, they responded by hiding forum threads about the subject. Eventually the treasurer parted ways with the team, and although they claim they didn't kick their treasurer out, their treasurer felt more or less like they had no choice but to leave, feeling effectively kicked out.
Their apparent respect for their own stated internal practices was basically non-existent and their way of addressing concern raised does not appear to have been great, and their attempt to shut down discussion without explaining anything was bad, and when they did make a statement it did not feel entirely forthright or comprehensive, and it was different in many ways from what the treasurer had said, making it hard to figure out what really happened.
It doesn't appear that any money was used in an improper way (all valid project-related costs, no tickets to Disneyland), only that it was not reviewed + processed consistently with their own internal policies. The management wants to emphasize the 'no improper use' part, which is fair enough so far as it goes. But it does not make them appear trustworthy should there be a real question in the future where we need to rely on their version of events to get to the bottom of something.
...and it's not even just the controversies. Manjaro feels like they play fast and loose with everything. Arch doesn't include AUR helpers by default specifically because of the potential for user-generated packages to install malware or do something damaging (with the intent being that if you want to use the AUR you really ought to understand the implications). Manjaro not only includes AUR helpers--it seems to actively encourage its use for packages not officially maintained. Though, in their defense, their wiki page does (finally?) include fair warnings borrowed from Arch[1]. I'm just not sure it shares the same visibility.
Otherwise it feels like a parasitic project masquerading as "Arch but easier." While there is truth to the latter, the oddly curious aspect to me--having been helping newbie Linux users for a couple years now--is that it seems new users generally have more long-term problems with Manjaro than they do with Arch. I don't have any facts to back this up, but speaking from my own anecdotes one would think the "easier" distro wouldn't be subject to this sort of trouble.
Also, they recently lost all of their support forum images earlier this month[2].
Unfortunately, the only other easy distro is Ubuntu, and not having the AUR or the Arch wiki or the quite good Manjaro forums and having to use potentially-dead PPAs for things because Ubuntu packages are out of date is less easy.
The OpenSUSE distros--Leap and Tumbleweed--don't get a lot of attention but they're worthy, relatively easy to use, alternatives to Ubuntu and Arch respectively.
Leap is an LTS distro that is more up to date than Ubuntu LTS and Tumbleweed is a rolling release that has enough QA that it doesn't blow up as frequently as Arch.
I just installed OpenSUSE on 7 computers over the last month. On my personal ones, I was previously running Kubuntu, then Manjaro, and now OpenSUSE. On work ones, most were on CentOS 7. I installed Tumbleweed on the personal ones, including a laptop, and Leap on the work ones.
Overall my experience has been great and I love OpenSUSE. However, I definitely would not recommend them for beginners for a few reasons.
Tumbleweed doesn't support certain browser video out of the box in Firefox. I had to enable a repository, and download libav packages to get it to work. The package names were confusing (why do I need libav 56 and 57 when 58 is already installed?). I had already installed the packages from the default repo, but they specifically needed to be installed from Packman.
GUI scaling between different displays is completely broken on Leap. Certain things scale, other things don't, and it looks horrible.
Normally, I get super annoyed when people take little things like that and make a huge issue out of them. They are little problems and I solved both of them, and love OPENS USE. But with Manjaro, I didn't have any problems from fresh install. Even switchable laptop graphics worked. Manjaro is very easy to recommend to someone afraid to open a terminal.
I do agree that "easy" isn't a solved space in the Linux world (Pop!_OS by System 76 is supposed to be quite good albeit also Ubuntu-based).
I don't think that necessarily absolves problems with the AUR or including AUR helpers out of the box. I do understand that the AUR is incredibly useful for a wide(r?) array of software, but I take issue with Manjaro's approach of foisting it on potentially unsuspecting users who may not know enough to understand that these are user-maintained packages that anyone could upload. I'd say I don't think it's a particularly responsible thing to do, but Manjaro's approach seems to eschew caution, throwing it entirely to the wind.
But, I confess it could be because I'm a long time Arch user protecting the status quo. I understand that the traditional approach (install base-devel, copy the target PKGBUILD, run makepkg, run pacman -U) is an obstacle to a lot of users. That said, I think it's a good thing because the community repo has a ton of commonly used software (maintained by TUs) so there isn't a huge requirement on diving into the AUR now as there was 5 years ago.
My fear is that encouraging people to blindly install PKGBUILDs via yay or pamac will eventually nail someone.
I wish PinePhone would partner with Arch or Debian instead.
Word. Debian is great! In the past when I see people using Ubuntu, I always wondered why? It is so interesting how people in tech just fall into the fashion trap.
My probably-flawed remembrance of the situation, as a Debian (2001+)/Gentoo(2004-8) user:
Canonical showed up to the party with a substantial concerted and sustained effort of funding/developers to take the existing Debian framework and make it more user-friendly.
In particular, Ubuntu was willing to package substantially non-free software into the experience. Things like Flash just worked most of the time. There was a substantial emphasis on usability, so that Linux-on-the-desktop could reach people with less background knowledge (everyone was doing this, of course, but Ubuntu seemed to put less emphasis on other things).
When Ubuntu emerged, Debian users were concerned that Ubuntu would take over the DFSG-software world and make it, in the long run, less free. What turned out to happen, in this case, was that the approachability of Ubuntu, built atop the Debian foundation, drew many more users away from RedHat/Fedora and ultimately strengthened the Debian/Ubuntu userbase and ecosystem. The usability really mattered -- I've repaired the occasional Debian system with Ubuntu boot-disks simply because the drivers, at the time, worked better.
Thanks to the intrinsic properties of open-source development, many of the good things about Ubuntu have found their way into Debian (and GNU/Linux at large). The Debian of today is a much more-readily usable experience than the Debian of 2004 thanks to the work of a great many people.
> when I see people using Ubuntu, I always wondered why?
As someone (still) using Ubuntu today, I have 1 simple answer: OOB experience.
Back in the days, I could insert a Ubuntu live-CD (remember CDs?), and have a fully working system, including proprietary graphics-driver and wifi-firmware. And installing from that Live-CD gave me the same experience once installed.
Basically, it was a machine 100% ready to use, with everything autodetected, with absolutely zero manual effort.
Debian otoh required me to hook up a wired network connection (because those had free drivers), and then manually track down which packages contained the proprietary drivers and firmware I needed.
That single thing made a world of difference to me back then, and it still does today.
> I see people using Ubuntu, I always wondered why? It is so interesting how people in tech just fall into the fashion trap.
I would rather attribute it to advertising, and probably some contracts with the right people. Canonical did a lot of advertising in the past years, and contracts can mean a school mandates the installation of Ubuntu, which translates in hundreds of students becoming accustomed to it, together with some of their parents and friends, and so on.
This is something completely out of the reach for a community supported distribution like Debian; attempting to change it would mean putting a corporation behind it, which would be a recipe for destruction of its principles.
Because I like having a stable system with a known "good for" date, rather than "when it's ready". I particularly like using LTS for systems that I don't want to have to touch very often...just set unattended security updates on and leave it be.
I realize I could do something similar with Debian, but testing isn't generally stable enough for the use cases I have in mind, whereas stable gets stuck with some very old packages. If I need a new package toward the end of the lifespan of a LTS, I can often find PPA. If not, I'll just compile it myself.
It's just my preference. To be honest, probably a big part is that Ubuntu is mostly what I've used the past decade.
It's nice that Ubuntu has been very predictable getting releases out on a schedule, while Debian's approach has been "when it's ready", which could sometimes be a very long time between stable releases.
Debian's been on a 2-year release cadence since at least 2007. I agree, they don't come out like clockwork the way Ubuntu LTS editions or macOS do but they come out in the first half of the year they're supposed to. At worst it's 2.5 years between releases at best it's under 2 years.
It is so interesting how people in tech jump to baseless conclusions about others' behavior that differs from their own...
Personally, I shifted to Ubuntu since it removed headaches re: getting a system running out of the box. By the time i shifted in ~2011 I had already transitioned through SLS -> Slackware -> RedHat -> Debian over the 1993-2011 period. After 18 years, Ubuntu brought relief in that I didn't have to deal with fiddling with things to get a system up and running. At that point the fun-factor of fiddling with the system had worn off and I was mostly concerned with getting work done, which Ubuntu addressed. Last time I tried Debian (~4 years ago?), it felt like it had caught up in terms of the out-of-the-box experience, which was nice.
> In the past when I see people using Ubuntu, I always wondered why?
Because I don't have a wired internet connection, and my wifi adapter requires proprietary drivers. If I could just download and install from an ISO like I can with Ubuntu, I'd switch to Debian in a heartbeat, but I don't feel like having to do manual workarounds just to get a running Linux distro.
But not any sort of actual one--do you imagine that "unofficial" has a technical meaning of greater significance than that Debian people don't care for proprietary binary blobs?
The Debian site makes hard to find the operating system images containing binary firmware for various devices, but they're all there. Another poster published the right link, however should you some day not have it handy, a search for "debian firmware image" will lead you to it both on DuckDuckGo and Google.
Installing Debian 11 on a seven year old laptop to test something involved Debian helpfully mentioning it was missing network drivers and couldn't continue (okay), which effectively meant searching the internet for the files mentioned on another computer (dubious). Because this laptop was being used exclusively to test something on Debian 11 (openssh-server with U2F support) I just settled for some random GitHub repo with the driver binary (the only place I could find it). Not a great user experience.
The Ubuntu way is to suggest installing non-free drivers from the same reputable source as the rest of the distro: by clicking your assent right there in the installer.
It really comes down to installers with proprietary firmware blobs that you need to install on laptops.
Debian's download page makes it hard to find the images with the non-free bits. They're there, though, if you dig just a bit.
Then, on laptops that have both Intel and Nvidia graphics hardware, for some reason the installers insist on loading both the i915 and nouveau kernel modules, which then fight over the console. (I asked over at the nouveau IRC, and they said a one-liner patch would fix that, still after all these years.) So, you add "nouveau.modeset=0" to the boot line on those laptops.
Finally, there is the confusion over the name "unstable", which is what people using Debian run, at least for the parts that need to be up to date, like browsers, media players (mpv), and firmware.
But the experience once you have got set up is better than on Ubuntu.
In 2006, I had a brand new asus laptop. I first tried To install Debian. Then I tried Fedora, or Redhat, I don’t remember when that split was. My next try was Ubuntu, which went without a hitch. Since it’s always worked for me, I’ve stuck with it.
This was after several years of running Redhat, Suse and Debian on desktops, so I wasn’t a newbie.
I had a similar experience, although I went back to Fedora around 2013 and was amazed at how good it has gotten. If you're happy then no reason to change, but if you are mad about Snap or any of the other issues of the day, give Fedora another try. It's really great at the "just works" these days while still staying super fresh.
for me personally easier to use installer, proprietary driver/codec support out of the box, faster release cycle, debian stable is too old for me and unstable can break at at all times/doesn't receive any major updates before new releases and so on. Also Ubuntu for the longest time used to be the only distro shipping with good font rendering settings, staring at code all day this actually was fairly important to me
so basically Ubuntu 'just works', if I ran Debian I'd just replicate Ubuntu's default settings pretty much anyway so I can just save myself the few hours.
Unstable aka Sid receives updates always, I think your thinking of Testing which goes into a freeze period before each major release of Debian.
Sid has been quite stable for me, the packages are much newer than Ubuntu (generally on par with Arch or close to it) and the few noteworthy bugs I have seen over the years have been reported and handled within 24 to 48hrs of said package being updated with the problematic code.
Why do you say that exactly? When Canonical developer fixed GNOME infamous bugs aren't those contribution getting into Debian?
My impression is that Ubuntu always respected Debian and always encouraged all fixes to happen upsteeam, for example for new packages you can see that Ubuntu is asking people to submit them to Debian (so everyone benefits) https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuDevelopment/NewPackages#NEW_pa...
Came here to say this. I respect both communities like KDE and companies like RedHat (before it was acquired). But when call yourself a community but act more like a company (and a toxic one at that) is where you lose all my respect.
Not having used Manjaro personally, what's the advantage here? My impression was that it was essentially Arch with a user friendly installer and possibly some nicer defaults.
This seems desirable if you're setting up a PC, but is there really added value there if you're building a ROM image for a phone? It seems like you'd be doing a ton of manual installing and configuring anyway, since it's such an unusual target compared to a typical desktop, regardless of cpu architecture...
I have used manjaro on my personal laptop for the past 4+ years and I share the same sentiment. Great for a computer but I'm not sure what value is added on the pine phone.
What all of these distros basically do is some non-trivial amount of integration of existing software, and configuring/patching it for PinePhone, presumably.
Not sure about manjaro specifically, but it looks like it will be another phosh based distro. Their forum will probably have more info eventually:
> I wish PinePhone would partner with Arch or Debian instead.
I exclusively use Arch on my other computers, so I initially put the upstream Arch ARM on my PinePhone, but it's just not in a state that most users (even tinkerers) would be inclined to work with. Manjaro and some of the other distributions are close to fully functional.
I'm sure Pine64 would love to partner with Arch ARM (or any distribution) that would like to focus on providing a good user experience on the device.
IMO, Postmarket OS provides the best experience on the device at this time.
Yes, while YMMV, I've found it to be in or near the top tier of images as far as hardware support for the pinephone. All the top distros are developed in the open so they tend to improve together. Like all distros on the phone, Manjaro breaks sometimes but they are doing a pretty good job. I've had the best luck with Mobian, but Manjaro and Fedora were a close second.
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/hxpj87/change_in_man...
I wish PinePhone would partner with Arch or Debian instead.