For more than a decade, Ubuntu was my Linux distribution of choice. But, for the first time in a long while, I distro-hopped. I now run Manjaro and couldn’t be happier. It’s just that good!
Ubuntu Is Still Great, Too!
I still rate Ubuntu very highly, and I have great respect for Canonical. Over in the corporate world, no one comes close to the success Red Hat has had with promoting Linux as a serious enterprise infrastructure tool. You could make the same argument for Canonical, and its success with making Linux accessible for newcomers to the Linux desktop.
A lot of people who use Linux for the first time stick a toe in the water with Ubuntu. Once they’ve found their feet and get a bit of experience, some people move on to other distributions. I’ve heard the same story many times, both in-person and online. People tell me they’re on a particular distribution—Fedora, Debian, you name it, I’ve heard it—but they started on Ubuntu. If their current distribution had been their first foray into Linux, they doubt they would have stuck with it. That’s a massively important role for Ubuntu to play.
No business or company is perfect. Canonical has made some ill-considered moves through the years, such as foisting the Unity desktop—designed to maximize screen space on netbooks—onto all other computers. But, tellingly and reassuringly, it has listened to its user base and reversed some of those decisions. The Amazon search results by default, which were removed, are a good example. On the whole, I still consider Canonical to be a force for good in the Linux-sphere. My decision to move had nothing to do with the organization behind Ubuntu.
So, why did I move to Manjaro, and is it right for you?
Manjaro Blows Past Ubuntu in Speed
For research and other purposes, I keep a lot of VirtualBox images of different Linux distributions. It was hard not to notice that Manjaro in a virtual machine was almost as fast as Ubuntu running on my hardware.
That was a compelling factor because I often need to compile big codebases. The faster my computer can get through that task, the faster I can move on to the next.
