manjarno

Repository which documents some reasons for not using Manjaro.

Disclaimer: I don't hate Manjaro. These are some reasons which made me consider shifting to a different distro. However, I still believe that Manjaro is a good starting point for beginners who want to explore an Arch ~~based~~ like distro.

Note: To clarify my stance, I should state what I use personally. I use Endeavour OS, which uses Arch repositories directly. They maintain a separate repository for distributing packages for theming, some small utilities and drivers - none of which override any packages in Arch mainline repositories.

Note: Some of the core problems, including pamac traffic [17], [18], [19], and security vulnerabilities in the Manjaro system updater [2] have since been fixed. The package respository issues are rare in practice and are often isolated to individual packages.

Package Repository issues

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 [1]! To quote the wiki,

In fact, the differences between Manjaro and Arch are far greater than the differences between the popular Ubuntu distribution and its many derivatives, including Mint and Zorin.

(Yes, Manjaro isn't Arch and Manjaro users shouldn't use the "btw" line. However, I don't really care.)

Own repository

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

The problems introduced

If Manjaro had to be actually stable, it needs to hold back the AUR packages as well. It has to maintain its AUR that is in sync with the Manjaro repos.

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 which has fortunately been fixed [2].

The vulnerability that used to exist

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.

The amount of attacks that could have been done due to this vulnerability is a lot!

In an update, password less updates in pamac (Manjaro's AUR helper) were sneaked in and from the look in the issue [4] 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!

SSL Certificates

Manjaro let their SSL certificates expire not once, not twice, not thrice, but four times [5]! The first time, they asked the users to use a private window and/or change the system time [6]. The second time when the SSL certificates expired, they did the same [7]. The third SSL certificate expiration was handled a little more sanely[8]. The fourth time, HSTS was set but the website was still down [16].

Sending Unexpectedly Large Traffic volume to AUR

In the past, this repository has used the term DDOS for this scenario. However, the term DDOS has a very specific meaning, and it is not the right term to use in this context.

Status Quo: Mon, 23 April, 2023

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

With Pamac 10.5.0 release we even optimized on how the search functions in general, but step by step.

first we delayed the search and not issue a query when there was a keystroke

then Arch AUR Developers started to create a database which we downloaded. (Due to our big user base even that created issues)

we transferred the 8 MB to our own CDN infrastructure which is sponsored by CDN77 now we pre-load the databases locally so pamac does searches "offline"

It is a process and complex issues won't get solved in a blink of a second.

So to conclude:

we shipped a new version of pamac to our stable branch that accidentally sent thousands of requests on the 2020-04-26 to the AUR per user. This rendered the AUR offline for all users across every Arch-based distro for a few hours.

on the 2021-10-14 we shipped a new pamac version to our stable branch, which includes an updated search feature across the application. However it resulted in pamac being blocked again. This may have been the cause for the day’s earlier outage.

Further info on the steps they have taken: [17], [18], [19]

Pamac Traffic Spike history

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 [9].

On 2021-10-14, Pamac was once again blocked by the AUR for shipping another version that flooded the AUR with requests [10, 11]. However the updated version itself was meant to mitigate problems. (See above)