I am a Linux noobie and have only used Mint for around six months now. While I have definitely learned a lot, I don’t have the time to always be doing crazy power user stuff and just want something that works out of the box. While I love Mint, I want to try out other decently easy to use distros as well, specifically not based on Ubuntu, so no Pop OS. Is Manjaro a possibly good distro for me to check out?
Not really an opinion but I guess an experience - Manjaro was my first ever Linux distro.
I switched to it around 4 years ago and everything seemed to work except that I had this issue where if a game was running for 30 minutes or longer, it would progressively run worse and worse until it either crashed or I would just restart it. Didn’t really find any solution online, the issue didn’t happen on windows so I just switched back after 2 weeks.
Half a year later I decided to give it another shot, but I had a completely different issue I couldn’t figure out how to fix, so I switched away from it 3 days later to Mint. Switched back to Windows a day later because I wasn’t much of a fan of apt when compared to pacman, and arch (what Manjaro is based on) is this mythical distro that’s very hard to install and use, so I didn’t bother.
Then another half a year later I switched to arch and stuck to it, with minor distro hopping here and there but always came back to arch. Thanks to Manjaro, I knew pacman commands and had overcome the fear of the terminal, which did make the switch to arch much easier.
That being said, my opinion is that you should at the very least try it. If the distro gives you no problems - fantastic, but if gives you major issues like in my case, then at least you get to familiarize yourself with arch-based distributions and maybe try EndeavourOS or Arch in the future.
Don’t even bother with Manjaro tbh.