Manjaro
A user-friendly Arch-based rolling-release distribution.
Manjaro provides Arch's rolling-release model with a graphical installer (Calamares), sane defaults, and a slightly more conservative package release cadence than Arch itself. Updates flow from Arch's repositories to Manjaro's testing branch, then to its unstable branch, and finally to its stable branch — so Manjaro users typically get an Arch update a week or two later than Arch users would.
Several desktop editions are official: Xfce, KDE Plasma, GNOME, plus community editions for Cinnamon, MATE, Budgie, i3, and others. The installer makes choosing a desktop straightforward, which is a noticeable usability win over Arch's documentation-driven manual installation.
Manjaro has been popular as a way to enjoy Arch's package selection (including AUR packages) and rolling-release freshness without the effort of installing Arch from scratch. Critics have pointed out that the staggered-update model can cause AUR breakage when AUR packages assume the very latest upstream Arch packages, which is a real but manageable trade-off.
Install
Download an ISO from https://manjaro.org/download/
Authors
- Manjaro Linux team