Another “difference between” Linux question: What ist the actual difference between them?
How fast/stable are releases, compared to each other and in comparison to upstream Arch?
I think I dont get the difference because in my understanding Arch is a rolling release and with both alternatives you want to stay as close to there releases as possible, but dont break you system frequently, right?
So whats the main differences?
Manjaro was my first distro. I used a number of AUR packages and ran into excessive dependency issues due to Manjaro’s packages being held back and often a version or two behind. This eventually led me to switch to vanilla arch. Unless one plans on not using any AUR packages at all, I do not recommend it.
Manjaro also uses the pamac gui package manager, which has a bit of a history of “DDoS”-ing the AUR with excessive requests. Apparently, the search field in pamac would begin querying the AUR after every letter typed to try and populate autocomplete results, hammering it with requests. Pamac also does not distinguish between package repos, so even just having AUR enabled and searching for a regular repo package would send requests to the AUR. Apparently it got so bad that it took down the AUR and they started returning 403 to requests from pamac users. In fact, this happened a second time and got them blocked again. This got the Manjaro devs in bad graces with a number of Linux folks as it was not a bug, but a poor design choice.
“Poor design choice” that comes across at first as a nice feature to end-users is the underlying philosophy in Manjaro.
This is why you have so many fans saying that it is great and that the detractors are wrong. It is also why it has so many passionate detractors.