Arch Linux For Newbies? Manjaro Is Here! 120
Penurious Penguin writes "Well within the top ten Linux distros, Arch Linux has a strong following for sure. But with an installation process requiring a little more involvement than the average distro, not every prospective user is ready to embrace the Arch Way, and understandably so. This is where Manjaro steps in. With a 100% compatibility with Arch, uncompromising adherence to principia KISS and a pre-configured Xfce, — or alternatively available GNOME & KDE — those who've been hesitating to explore Arch now have a few less excuses.
And a little side-note for those still bitter about the lack of package-signing: You'll be glad to know that Arch fully implemented package-signing in June of 2012."
Can it be made friendlier and stay true to Arch? (Score:5, Interesting)
One of the main points of installing Arch is that it forces you to learn about how your system is built.
While some people have reported problems with Arch's rolling updates, I have had zero troubles in my 6 months of using it. When something pops up that requires you to do anything more than "sudo pacman -Syu", you can always find the solution on the forum announcements.
It's absolutely true that I would not bother to spend the time setting up an Arch install for someone else. I gave a friend a Kubuntu install and I was surprised to see how much stuff was buggy on it compared to my own KDE Arch. So maybe there is a niche for this, but I am not at all convinced that things can be made "user-friendly" without them also becoming non-transparent.