Manjaro


Manjaro is a free and open-source Linux distribution based on the Arch Linux operating system. Manjaro has a focus on user friendliness and accessibility, and the system itself is designed to work fully "straight out of the box" with its variety of pre-installed software. It features a rolling release update model and uses Pacman as its package manager.

Official editions

Manjaro Xfce, which features Manjaro's own dark theme as well as the Xfce desktop.
Manjaro KDE, which features Manjaro's own dark Plasma Theme as well as the latest KDE Plasma, Apps and Frameworks.
Manjaro GNOME became the third official version with the Gellivara release and offers the GNOME desktop along with a version of the Manjaro theme.
While not official releases, Manjaro Community Editions are maintained by members of the Manjaro Community. They offer additional user interfaces over the official releases, including Awesome, Bspwm, Budgie, Cinnamon, i3, LXDE, LXQT, MATE, and Openbox.
The Deepin edition was dropped as of 18.0 Illyria.

Features

Manjaro comes with both a CLI and a graphical installer. The rolling release model means that the user does not need to upgrade/reinstall the whole system to keep it all up-to-date inline with the latest release. Package management is handled by Pacman via command line, and front-end GUI package manager tools like the pre-installed Pamac. It can be configured as either a stable system or bleeding edge in line with Arch.
The repositories are managed with their own tool called BoxIt, which is designed like Git.
Manjaro includes its own GUI settings manager where options like language, drivers, and kernel version can be simply configured.
Certain commonly used Arch utilities such as the Arch Build System are available but have alternate implementations in Manjaro.
Manjaro Architect is a CLI net installer which allows the user to choose their own kernel version, drivers and desktop environment during the install process. Both the official and the community edition's desktop environments are available for selection. For GUI based installations, Manjaro uses the GUI installer Calamares.

Release history

The 0.8.x series releases were the last versions of Manjaro to use a version number. The desktop environments offered, as well as the number of programs bundled into each separate release have varied in different releases.

Relation to Arch Linux

The main difference compared to Arch Linux is the repositories.
Manjaro uses three sets of repositories:
, non-security related package updates derived from the Arch Linux stable branch to the Manjaro stable branch typically have a lag of a few weeks.

History

Manjaro was first released on July 10, 2011. By mid 2013, Manjaro was in the beta stage, though key elements of the final system had all been implemented such as: a GUI installer ; a package manager with its choice of frontends; Pamac for Xfce desktop and Octopi for its Openbox edition; MHWD ; and Manjaro Settings Manager.
GNOME Shell support was dropped with the release of version 0.8.3. in 2012. However, efforts within Arch Linux made it possible to restart the Cinnamon/GNOME edition as a community edition. An official release offering the GNOME desktop environment was reinstated in March 2017.
During the development of Manjaro 0.9.0 at the end of August 2015, the Manjaro team decided to switch to year and month designations for the Manjaro version scheme instead of numbers. This applies to both the 0.8.x series as well as the new 0.9.x series, renaming 0.8.13, released in June 2015, as 15.06 and so on. Manjaro 15.09, codenamed Bellatrix and formerly known as 0.9.0, was released on 27 September 2015 with the new Calamares installer and updated packages.
In September 2017, Manjaro announced that support for i686 architecture would be dropped because "popularity of this architecture is decreasing". However, in November 2017 a semi-official community project "manjaro32", based on archlinux32, continued i686 support.

Derivatives

Netrunner Rolling, in addition to Blue Systems Netrunner, which is Debian-based. The first version of Netrunner Rolling was 2014.04, which based on Manjaro 0.8.9 KDE. It was released in 2014. The last released version was Netrunner Rolling 2019.04.
The Sonar GNU/Linux project was aimed at providing a barrier-free Linux to people who required assistive technology for computer use, with supporting GNOME and MATE desktop. The first version was released in February 2015, the latest release was in 2016. As of 2017, the Sonar project was discontinued.

Hardware

Although Manjaro can be installed on most systems, some vendors sell computers with Manjaro pre-installed on them. Suppliers of computers pre-installed with Manjaro include StarLabs Systems, Tuxedo Computers, manjarocomputer.eu, and Pine64.

Reception

Manjaro Linux is noted as an easy desktop to set up and use, suitable for both beginners and experienced users. It is recommended as an easy and friendly way to install, build and maintain a cutting-edge Arch-derived distribution. Some users will find appeal in the large range of contributed software available from the AUR, which has a reputation for being kept up to date from upstream resources.
Very early versions of Manjaro had a reputation for crashing and for installation difficulties, but this was reported to have improved with later versions, and by 2014 was, according to Jesse Smith of DistroWatch, "proving to be probably the most polished child of Arch Linux I have used to date. The distribution is not only easy to set up, but it has a friendly feel, complete with a nice graphical package manager, quality system installer and helpful welcome screen. Manjaro comes with lots of useful software and multimedia support."
Smith did a review of Manjaro 17.0.2 Xfce in July 2017 and observed that it did "a lot of things well". He went on to extol some of the notable features as part of his conclusion: