Welp, I made a similar thread yesterday regarding Manjaro but I decided to swap to Fedora as my daily driver for stability purposes. Unfortunately since fedora is yet another non Debian distro I need help finding a Syncterm replacement.
I’m my previous thread it was pointed out to me that syncterm has a docker option which I can run on Fedora, but I’d prefer running an app locally if possible.
I tried the Syncterm snap package which boots inside bash, but it doesn’t have ANSI support (which is the entire point of using Syncterm) since I assume it’s simply piggy backing off of bash- hence the 1.5* review on the snap store.
Looking for options… if anyone can help a Linux noob I’m all ears. I tried Alien to convert deb to rpm and fell on my face.
If you are looking for something a little more stable than Manjaro but still Arch based and beginner friendly EndeavorOS is a good option.
Not an answer to your question or suggesting you jump from Fedora just putting it out there.
These days, there is also the official guided installer for arch that may be worth a try. I had similar issues with Manjaro, but since this has been around I’ve never had a reason to try any arch derivative.
Good to hear. Thanks for the link. I’ll have to test it out in a VM
My brother had that OS. It worked fine until it got a bug that the computer froze when he enabled the wifi, and the only way to stop it was pressing the power button. I couldn’t figure out the cause, and there was many unnecessary things coming with the OS, so I helped him to install Arch instead. Now, it works well and feels clean.
EDIT: based on the comments, the issue happened with arch too.
Odds are it would have come up on a regular Arch install too, and simply reinstalling is what fixed it.
EndeavourOS is essentially just a GUI installer for Arch with some defaults changed.
I was wondering this, too. I’m too new to Manjaro to have any opinion about its long-term stability, but it doesn’t make intuitive sense to me that Manjaro would be less stable than a distro that is based solely on the AUR.
I wonder if Arch newbies choose Manjaro initially, improve their knowledge of Linux, then switch to Arch if their installation fails. After that, having reached Linux’s final boss, they know that all further problems in Arch are just part of the experience.
Or is it maybe that Arch installations are often more minimalist than Manjaro and so are less likely to have conflicts? By way of example, and going from memory, the base EndevourOS install is around 900 packages, while the base Manjaro install is over 14,000 packages.
I really like my Manjaro installations, so as you can imagine, I’m hoping it isn’t an inherently flawed distro.
I’ve been running Manjaro for about 6 years. I’ve only had self induced issues.
- I restarted during a GPU driver update
- I only used pacman to do system updates and it kept failing. I needed to use pamac for those round of updates instead.
Arch is a better OS in that you have more control of exactly what it will do. But Manjaro also provides a great experience out of the box with all the major DEs. It really comes down to how much convenience are you willing to trade for control.
For what it’s worth, I’ve only noticed the slower Manjaro repo helping me once when steam fonts broke on the arch repo. So I basically had a warning and was able to switch to the beta version of the steam client to avoid that issue. So the slower Manjaro repo is not a selling point IMO, but the DE tweaks and configurations are.
Looks like they’ve gotten better in the last year or so, but there’s a pretty strong pattern of fuck-ups that have put a lot of the community off of Manjaro: https://manjarno.pages.dev/
If this was a recent occurrence, it may have been from the 6.6.5 kernel. There was a WiFi regression in that version that did exactly that, slowed the system to an absolute crawl. I got hit by it on my PC and ended up hosing my whole install (because I panicked and botched things up), but my laptop was fine. I finally got things reinstalled a couple days later when 6.6.6 was released, which fixed the regression anyway.
I get it but that sounds like a bit of a niche problem and I don’t know if OP, as a beginner, would have much luck setting up Arch on their own without running into some weird issue of a similar caliber.
Isn’t it just an installer, welcome app, theming, and maybe an Nvidia driver helper?
I don’t think Endeavour really adds that much, but maybe my perception has been wrong this whole time 🤷
No, you are right. EndeavourOS is about two-dozen packages on top of the Arch repos and AUR ( 80,000 packages ). Most of the additional packages are just nice-to-have utilities you can enjoy or avoid.
EOS ( EndeavourOS ) is more of an opinionated Arch installer than a stand-alone distribution. Other than theming, almost everything in a fresh EOS install comes from the Arch repos. Even the kernel is native Arch.
I happen to like the way EOS sets up the system, including that it installs yay by default which makes the AUR available right away.
You can disable the EOS repos in EndeavourOS if you want. It really is just Arch.
That’s exactly what makes Endeavor a great option over Manjaro. You just end up with more-or-less normal Arch instead of the jank of Manjaro.
Oh, for sure. I was responding to the guy saying “I couldn’t figure out the cause, and there was many unnecessary things coming with the OS”
Doesn’t seem like there’s that much extra with Endeavour vs Arch.
Oh gotcha – sorry, missed the context
I also had issues with the wifi on EndevourOS just a few weeks ago. Ended up going back to Manjaro.
Since EndeavourOS uses the Arch packages and the Arch kernel, there is nothing in EndeavoyrOS that could impact WiFi that would not be the same in Maeve Arch.
My 6800xt desktop regularly froze on endeavour, but on nobara it hasn’t frozen nearly as frequently. Also, i encountered an update issue that broke most of the packages, and I spent an absurd amount of time fixing it. It happened again after a couple of months. I managed to fix it quicker this time, but endeavour os (and arch) is not as stable as the experienced arch users make it to be. I’m not an arch newbie btw. I’ve been using arch, Manjaro, and endeavour for close to 10 years now. Just recently switched to nobara. (distrohopped frequently since Ubuntu 5.04, but I just want a maintenance free distro these days)
I really wanted to love Endeavour. I run it for about 2 days then it broke when systemd updated, literally couldn’t get past bios (thread here for the interested reader). The combination of Dracut and Systemd isn’t as stable as on arch. And then the recovery steps don’t seem to work so I just started again with arch.
Just a cautionary tale for arch based distros and their stability.
You must have tried EOS recently. They only just moved to Dracut. Most of my EndeavoyrOS machines pre-date that change and it does not force it on you when you update. It would still be possible to use an older installer to avoid Dracut I suppose.
I only have Dracut on one laptop actually. That machine boots super fast though and I was considering moving to Dracut elsewhere. Interesting to hear that it might be less stable. I will have to look into that now. Thanks for the heads up.
if you feel comfortable with Debian based distros (or at least, to my understanding), why not use… Debian? or a Debian based system?
I loooove Debian and I don’t mind having older packages for better stability. However the only reason for me for not using Debian is actually KDE Plasma. I don’t want to miss out on new Plasma released and have to wait forever until I receive them.
pretty sure you don’t have to wait forever 😆
but fair
Debian is pain to set up, most notably driver issues cuz of linux libre
There is an option in the installer to enable the non-free software repository. It’s just not checked by default.
I think in Debian 12 they enable it by default?
In debian 12 the installer asks if you want to enable non-free
Have you considered using Arch on which Manjaro is based?
This way you won’t have issues with AUR. It’s not hard to install, you can use
archinstallhelper if you want, it’s available in the default installation media.If they want a full-fledged system running Arch, then EndeavourOS might be the best bet. Archinstall is great for quickly installing Arch but there’s still quite a lot of set-up required after that, and for some people, they don’t really want to do that. EndeavourOS is essentially a ready-made Arch set up (or as another person said here, a very opinionated Arch install), and is based on Arch’s repos but has its own extra repo for its own software while Manjaro holds the packages back for two weeks (which creates sync problems with, say, the AUR)
there’s also Endeavour which I’m pretty sure uses the Arch repos
Uses exactly the Arch repos and kernel. EndeavourOS is more like an opinionated Arch install than a stand-alone distro. This is not a negative comment as I am an enthusiastic EndeavourOS user.
EndeavourOS is more like an opinionated Arch install
Fellow EOS user and this is a hilarious yet accurate description. Still have vanilla arch but EOS on my laptop now since I tend to mess with it often.
i too am a satisfied endevouros user. its great if you want something like manjaro, that doesnt break, or something like arch, but easier to get started.
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i also have not had manjaro break, but its what it’s known for, so people can be reluctant to use it
Or you could switch Manjaro to the unstable repos which mirror Arch
You can do this, and I have, but there can be issues during the switch if you are not careful.
The machine I use as my Jellyfin server used to be Manjaro and is now vanilla Arch ( having migrated it from Manjaro to Arch in place ). It still has a few quirks though. The quirks do not matter for what I use it for ( it is rock solid for Jellyfin ) but anytime I have to reboot or use the desktop, I am reminded. Nothing too serious and nothing I could not fix with a little time of course. That machine is purely functional though and I do not want to spend any time on it. Since my video is all on a second drive, I will probably nuke it and do a fresh EndeavourOS install one of these days. It would be much faster to re-install Jellyfin than to fix all the little warts. The other Manjaro systems I had were replaced with fresh EndeavourOS installs.
I’m out of the loop, why is Manjaro considered a “bad distro” ?
I have used it for quite some time now, and I enjoy it, i find it fairly simple, fast and pretty.
Is there something I’m missing ?
It feels like a fork for the sake of “I use arch BTW”
It doesn’t add anything of value on top of “vanilla” arch, but they still manage to break stuff that works in Arch, occasionally ddos AUR and if I recall correctly there was some controversy because the developers were assholes
Except of course that more ex-Manjaro people move to EOS than vanilla Arch. I have no data on this but there are certainlymore EOS commenters on Manjaro threads than pure Arch ( though often those groups overlap a lot as many people use both ).
I do not know anybody that uses both Manjaro along with any other Arch distro. You are either in or out on Manjaro.
That’s wrong though, isn’t it? AFAIK, Manjaro hosts their own repos with a focus on up to date but slightly more stable packages
That’s the main repos, not the AUR.
For sure, but the AUR poses a risk to any system if you’re not careful. I don’t think it’s really fair to blame Manjaro for that
But it is other way around. Manjaro clients were spamming requests to AUR taking it down.
I wasn’t aware of that. That definitely seems like a fair thing to criticise then
Going to weigh in, manjaro devs are kinda incompetent. They’ve ddosed the aur twice in the exact same way, showing that they hadn’t done anything to solve the inherent issue. Their ssl certs keep expiring, even though auto-renewal takes about ten minutes to set up while telling their users to “change your clocks time” as a patch solution while they fix their certs once (which took hours).
Their head arm developer sent a patch to asahi linux which broke x-org, showing he shipped code without so much as running the thing to test making a change well known and documented to cause this error with zero benefit to the project or his commit. This, after manjaro claimed that “manjaro works on the macbook m1” by using the asahi kernal with a full on campaign, shipping a random kernel from the release page which was known to be broken. It would not turn on, and could easily have broken users systems. Asahi at the time simply did not work, nor would it for a while.
They keep making dumb mistakes learning nothing and not asking for help when it’s obviously needed. Their two week delay, though it fixes some issues, commonly still ships known broken updates when unnecessary.
They put the aur directly next to flatpack and snap in pamac without a proper warning. The aur is dangerous, you need to know how to use it, and to read the pkgbuild. Anybody can put any app up there and you’ll be running arbitrary code on the system. Flatpack and snaps are quite safe, the aur is not. A while ago, a guy put a list of people who can “fuck themselves”, insults, and homophobic statements alongside two calls to a IP grabber in the dolphin emulator package. When there’s malware on linux, the aur is likely to be the first targeted
They’ve made many suggestions in their forums that lead to bad habits, putting more stress on arch devs and their servers.
It’s due to the continual incompetence of the devs, them damaging other projects they depend on, and the devs being quite unfriendly in the forums that people hate manjaro. I’d love to see it become better as the concept is a decent one but with the current leadership and work being done I have to caution against it’s use
My problem with Manjaro was that they continually kept their repos behind arch while still depending on the aur and other arch infrastructure. This caused problems like aur packages not being buildable, and software that used the arch debuginfod server being unusable.
Read the screenshot by OP. Can confirm that, too
I’ve been running Manjaro for about 5 years, and it’s still running solid.
Same here. I’ve used it on and off for years without any issues. My current install is around a year old and so far has been running smoothly.
I mostly keep it stock with GNOME and use it for dev work which it handles well
Oh, ok, I did not have any issue so far so that surprised me, but I guess I was just lucky
Mostly due to how the team behind Manjaro acts. Personally have been using plain arch for years while my Manjaro installation fucked itself after half a year.
A small compilation can be found in the link below: https://github.com/arindas/manjarno
Every time I’ve tried to use Manjaro, within a year or two the entire OS shits the bed. Whether it’s dependency hell, broken SSL certs or the display drovers fucking up. Legit never had that problem with other arch-based distros or arch itself, or even with fedora tumbleweed which is the “unstable” rolling release flavor of Fedora that I’m currently using.
This was my experience as well. Caused me to give up on Linux for a while as everyone was so eager to recommend manjaro back then.
It breaks. It may never break on you but it breaks on A LOT of people and, as a result, there are lots of “don’t use Manjaro people out ther”…
I am not going into detail as I am exhausted from arguing with Manjaro fans that want to pretend all is ex-Manjaro users are wrong about our own experience. The above answers your question. Believe it or not.
Apparently he still believes other Linux desktop distros don’t randomly brick themselves with updates every six months.
He’s in for. A treat.
Apparently he still believes other Linux desktop distros don’t randomly brick themselves with updates every six months.
Well they don’t.
My arch install doesn’t brick itself by itself. Sometimes an update needs some manual intervention but that doesn’t brick it.
They don’t. I’ve been on the same Debian install on laptop and desktop for years. It’ll make some odd decisions with packages sometimes, but it hasn’t bricked.
I don’t have hard data, but you don’t see these kinds of posts about Debian, Mint, Ubuntu or Fedora.
That’s why you use flatpaks and/or nix
God damn these replies are braindead
https://forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic.php?t=5658
Auto script that builds and installs for both Debian and Fedora.
Unfortunately, no RPMs exist on repos and COPR, which is Fedora’s AUR.
spoiler
Although considering the AUR package hasn’t been updated since June of last year, I doubt having a COPR build will be beneficial.
Nevertheless, it would be useful to have an available RPM. If I get time, I can submit one to COPR.
Good god, someone who actually read the OP’s question and replied with information respondent to it instead of just shrieking “how dare you not use the distro I like” at them. I was starting to think that was banned around here :)
I could kiss you! It worked! Not only was this solution great, but I also learned how to run a bash script and grab dev libraries to execute ncurses and make commands.
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You van try creating an arch linux distrobox and install yay inside that
Don’t understand why you’re being downvoted, this is definitely the cleanest solution.
There’s also a new handy app to manage the containers of distrobox: BoxBuddy, I’ve just noticed it switched to Rust and GTK now and, even better, it’s right there on Flathub!
Did someone really manage to convince you that Fedora would be more stable than Manjaro?
For the record, I’ve been using Manjaro for 3 years without any reinstall on my main laptop and I still haven’t witnessed any stability issue. My experience with Fedora has not been similar at all…
Not to contradict your experience. More for my own understanding. Do you use the AUR much?
Not OP but I’m using 82 AUR packages right now and I still agree.
A little, I must have 10 AUR packages installed.
I convinced myself that manjaro is less stable than fedora. But not completely. It depends on the device and what is installed on it.
For some reason, I was able to run Manjaro on my hp laptop without issues for a long time. However my brother on his Lenovo laptop, the manjaro update just killed itself after 2 months. And this always after some months the updater would not work anymore.
I then installed Fedora on his laptop, and damn that thing stayed up and running for 2y now. Even after major system update, never broke, and package install always worked, at least when the tutorials are up to date on special things.
Like installing video codecs, I had to do another command which was not mentioned on the fedora docs, in order to switch from ffmpeg libre to ffmpeg. And then the rest of the install commands would work.
Yes same here, I’ve been using Manjaro for a few years since I’m too busy to waste an entire day setting up a naked Arch. I have had no single stability issue, thing is rock solid
On the counterpart, fedora has always felt like I can’t get a single package installed without the need for arcane
sudo magic tricksand my system being unable to update anymore at the end of the process. I know that the problem probably lies between the bed and the keyboard, but come on, I am skilled enough to install and rice an Archlinux and manage my AUR packages without problems, but can’t install GCC on fedora? Hmmm…And I’m not even mentioning conflicts and packages being unavailable either because your version of fedora is too young or too old
Same. Fedora is one of the worst distros I tried.
Love Manjaro though.
It’s important people feel confident to make decisions for themselves and not just do what losers on the internet tell them to.
EndeavourOS is probably what you are looking for. Almost vanilla arch with a desktop capable package base, calameres GUI installer, no delayed updates, and some neet build hooks
Syncterm seems to be available in nixpkgs. It’s trivial to install Nix (the package manager, not NixOS the system) on top of any system you choose and then add one or two packages you need, in this case just Syncterm.
It’s not trivial on Fedora due to SELinux; you’ll need to use https://github.com/DeterminateSystems/nix-installer
Right, I didn’t consider SELinux, thanks for mentioning it.
You can just install Arch in a distrobox if you want or a debian + children in a distrobox, install the app and it should launch from your launcher like any other app you use. Distrobox is fantastic.
When I need to install something from the AUR, I just enter my Arch distrobox and do it, same for Ubuntu and stuff.
Edit:
I forgot to mention that you’ll need to use the distrobox-export command to make it so you can launch an app like any other easily from your launcher.
I have started using Distrobox + Arch as well to get the AUR in other systems. I quite like Chimera Linux for example but it has few packages at the point. Distrobox + Arch / AUR solves that perfectly.
Consider building it from source. A quick websearch for Syncterm Fedora and Syncterm Build had a few tutorials.
Or try taking a look at the AUR pkgbuild file, it’s basically an install script, might give you clues on how to build it yourself if you want to experiment and learn :)
That might be what I have to do. Back when I was on Kubuntu I built it from source using a tutorial for deb based machines. I searched for a similar guide with Fedora’s RPM as the focus but couldn’t find anything. Most Linux guides I see posted are for some flavor of Ubuntu.
Don’t worry about making a package, thats for distributing it.
Why do people use the aur on manjaro? I thought they specifically say that the aur is not supported on manjaro.
Why use an Arch-based distro if you can’t use the AUR? It’s like one of the most, if not the most defining feature of them
Because you get package updates before most other distros.
AUR is also not supported on Arch, so support has nothing to do with it.
On Arch the AUR is made specifically for arch users so while not supported by the distro Arch is supported by the aur.
That’s what I was wondering. Seems like a recipe for disaster having your main system be several versions behind them shoehorning bleeding dependencies for AUR programs into the mix.
They have an option in their own pamac GUI to enable the AUR. IMO if they want to send the message that it will cause issues and it shouldn’t be used, they shouldn’t make it so easy to enable. Or if they do want to make it that easy, display a clear disclaimer about the issues you can expect to run into if you try it.
I have no idea what syncterm is, a link would be useful. I can only find scetchy things.
But you write that it’s available for debian. Then just use distrobox and installl syncterm in a debian image and export it.
- Install distrobox https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Distrobox
- Use prefered image https://github.com/toolbx-images/images
- Use debians package manager and install package
- Export if needed https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox/blob/main/docs/usage/distrobox-export.md
- Enjoy
Literally the first result on DuckDuckGo and Google:
Thats what I said, only scetchy sites.
I’m sorry, but like half the sites for open source tools and programs look like that. Hell, the OpenSSH website doesn’t look that much more legitimate to my eyes.
I experienced that for windows 10 years ago but (almost) all projects on linux have adopted a new style over time.
I gotta agree that there are some very old projects but it just looks scetchy to me because it’s old and just off.
OpenSSH website looks perfectly legitimate. It’s quite similar to the site of the project that brought it to life, OpenBSD.
It’s also a very good looking website, no mobile or material-design bullshit where websites look all the same. It’s a very nice classy looking site.
If you don’t want to use Nix packages or DistroBox, you can try an alternative which is in the fedora repository, like Qodem
Qodem is in the repo?! I’ll just use that! Thank you.
You can get any software from any distro with distrobox.
Or nix
Or distrobox
? I was not starting an argument
Or distrobox
