Oh you silly goose!

See my reply for some sources I found.

Found this file by user “arindas” on GitHub which seems to highlight a lot of the issues that I’ve been seeing. To summarize:

Package Management

Manjaro maintains a separate repository that is not in sync with Arch’s main repositories which means Manjaro is not just Arch. To add to that, even Manjaro wiki states that it is not Arch!

Source: https://wiki.manjaro.org/index.php?title=Manjaro:_A_Different_Kind_of_Beast

Manjaro claims to be stable just by delaying packages for a week. This is not an approach a stable distribution would take at all!

Say that a package in the AUR depends on a library, say libxyz. And libxyz is in the main repos, not in the AUR. The package is updated so that it relies on the new features introduced in libxyz’s version 1.1 however Manjaro delays packages so libxyz is still on 1.0 in Manjaro. If you update the package in Manjaro, it will break because Manjaro holds back packages. So the only way Manjaro can be stable is by literally forking all the Arch related repositories including the AUR and keeping them in sync.

However it is important to note that often these problems are isolated to single packages and not the system as a whole. Please read #25 (comment) for additional context.

Security

The Manjaro system updater used to have a serious security vulnerability [in 2018] which has fortunately been fixed.

Source: https://lists.manjaro.org/pipermail/manjaro-security/2018-August/000785.html

This is actually a core package, not an extra or community package. To quote the list,

I have discovered an issue with one of your core Manjaro packages, manjaro-system 20180716-1 and earlier. The issue allows a local attacker to execute a Denial of Service, Arbitrary Code Execution, and Privilege Escalation attack.

In an update, password less updates in pamac (Manjaro’s AUR helper) were sneaked in and from the look in the issue made concerning this, the change was made to look like a “feature”. This is a major security issue considering that packages in AUR are not checked by Arch Linux maintainers (and Manjaro does not maintain its own either). Some AUR packages were found to be malware in the past. So think about a casual user (Manjaro’s target demographic are not really power users) installing a harmless-looking AUR package that could potentially mess up their system!

Source: https://gitlab.manjaro.org/applications/pamac/-/issues/719

The post also mentioned an issue where the Manjaro updater used bad practices when updating packages such as using the no-confirm flag. This appears to have been fixed from what I can tell.

Manjaro let their SSL certificates expire not once, not twice, not thrice, but four times! The first time [2015], they asked the users to use a private window and/or change the system time.

Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20150409095421/https://manjaro.github.io/expired_SSL_certificate/

Changing the system time could have unintended consequences such as with cron jobs not running at the intended time. It’s also not a best security practice to use an incognito window to bypass the SSL expiry alert. The correct solution is to not let the certificates expire in the first place, which is not difficult and is done by all secure websites.

The second time when the SSL certificates expired [2016], they did the same.

Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20160528135123/http://manjaro.github.io/SSL-Certificate-Expired/

This time the Manjaro developers didn’t recommend changing the system time, but they still recommended creating an exception for the Manjaro website.

The third SSL certificate expiration was handled a little more sanely [2021].

Source? https://web.archive.org/web/20220102232338/https://forum.manjaro.org/t/expired-certificate-for-iso-download-on-download-manjaro-org/96441

The fourth time, HSTS was set but the website was still down [2022].

Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20221013234550/https://manjarno.snorlax.sh/expiry-2022-08-17.png

Sending Unexpectedly Large Traffic volume to AUR

I think some of the dates and sources in this section were wrong, but I did my best to correct them.

On 2021-04-26, the AUR (Arch User Repository) faced a huge web traffic spike from pamac clients, caused by a bad version of pamac, which is the default Graphical Package Manager for Manjaro

Source: https://gitlab.manjaro.org/applications/pamac/-/issues/1017

Manjaro developers have developed thorough technical solutions to mitigate the huge traffic spike from pamac installations [2021-10-02]. They have outlined the steps taken here #25 (comment)

Source: https://gitlab.manjaro.org/applications/pamac/-/issues/1161

On 2021-10-14, Pamac was once again blocked by the AUR for shipping another version that flooded the AUR with requests. However the updated version itself was meant to mitigate problems.

Source: https://gitlab.manjaro.org/applications/pamac/-/issues/1135

Additional sources: https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxquestions/comments/wqzrpl/did_manjaro_just_forget_to_renew_the_ssl/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/q85t8n/deleted_by_user/

Thanks for the context :)

Could you elaborate on what you mean by Manjaro being “a known trap”?

Edit: See my reply for some sources I found.

I’m doing good.

Guessing this video from Seth Meyers channel is the one that got blocked on Bernie’s channel: https://youtube.com/watch?v=68ruWP-AM6Y

Man, I gotta watch that movie again!

It’s basically dropbox or Google Drive.

Same here in the US.

Edit: *'murca