We are excited to announce that Arch Linux is entering into a direct collaboration with Valve. Valve is generously providing backing for two critical projects that will have a huge impact on our distribution: a build service infrastructure and a secure signing enclave. By supporting work on a freelance basis for these topics, Valve enables us to work on them without being limited solely by the free time of our volunteers.
This opportunity allows us to address some of the biggest outstanding challenges we have been facing for a while. The collaboration will speed-up the progress that would otherwise take much longer for us to achieve, and will ultimately unblock us from finally pursuing some of our planned endeavors. We are incredibly grateful for Valve to make this possible and for their explicit commitment to help and support Arch Linux.
These projects will follow our usual development and consensus-building workflows. [RFCs] will be created for any wide-ranging changes. Discussions on this mailing list as well as issue, milestone and epic planning in our GitLab will provide transparency and insight into the work. We believe this collaboration will greatly benefit Arch Linux, and are looking forward to share further development on this mailing list as work progresses.
Does it even make sense to keep playing with a Manjaro VM or just go straight Arch?
I’ve been very happy with my Manjaro install on AMD GPU, everything worked out of the box on fist try install without any weird step. I would say you could jump straight to Arch/Arch-based, but first research about your GPU compatibility.
(I’m aware of how Manjaro is perceived and its downsides, please avoid comments suggesting me to switch).
Go endeavourOS if your first time. Manjaro has a bad track record, as shown at https://manjarno.pages.dev
Manjaro worked without issues for me for about 2 years, unlike EOS which broke within less than half a year and their forum is the most unhelpful and toxic clown show I’ve ever seen as they just insulted me to the point where the admins closed the thread and said I should make a new one if I still need help - hiding it in the process so it won’t get indexed and shine a bad light on them. So I find the Manjaro hate very unwarranted and it seems to get way more hate than it deserves. Most of it is just a bunch of “what if” scenarios that never happened.
Could you link to the thread? I had a good experience with the forums. It sounds like they locked it to prevent people from sending more bullying comments and suspended everyone.
The link lists a bunch of things that did happen, along with the thing on partial upgrades, which is guidance on the Arch wiki.
https://forum.endeavouros.com/t/grub-boot-error-after-update/42928/31
They were at least still able to write in other places. And given that experience I of course did not follow up with another thread, just to experience the same thing.
It lists a bunch of inconsequential things when it comes to the distro. The worst were the pamac DDOSing incidents. The SSL certificates of their websites I really don’t give a damn about but people then keep saying “yeah but if they are sloppy there then…”, without being able to provide examples where the distro was ever affected by it. They also keep arguing about the packaging on the AUR potentially being newer than the ones in Manjaro and thus potentially causing breakage, which is a weak argument - especially with how sloppily a lot of AUR packages are maintained. And if you’re super paranoid, just update the AUR when Manjaro updates.
Overall, hating on it feels like it became more of a meme with little substance, fueled by the general entitlement and elitism within the Linux community regarding their favorite distros.