I am trying to think of how to respond to this without being a jerk.

Let me skip to the end. Until very recently, I thought of Manjaro users as innocents that just did not understand the risk. Like islanders living next to a volcano that had never erupted in their lifetime.

I still view most Manjaro users that way. Manjaro defenders though I now think of as dog owners whose animals have bitten multiple times. When told, the owner insists that “my dog would never do that” or “if it did, you must have done something wrong”. I am done arguing with those people. All I can do is warn others that this dog has bitten several of us and you may not want to enter that yard. If you do, who knows, the dog may be friendly. Or not. Again, all I can tell you is that many of us have scars. Use that information as you will.

Most “Manjaro detractors” I have encountered have years of experience with both Manjaro and other Arch distros. Their tales come from experience. When they share their cautionary tales, there are often Manjaro defenders whose best defence is just to deny that what the “detractors” are saying ( about their own experience ) is real.

My core question for the defenders would be, if it is our fault, why do we only encounter the problems on Manjaro?

Let’s go through the bullets above one by one:

• I never did that on Manjaro. I probably do it more on EOS. Why only problems on Manjaro?
• why does my lack of knowledge of how the AUR works only break things on Manjaro?
• this bullet is the best. It admits that Manjaro has repeatedly broken things but we should not hold it against it. Literally this is saying that “Manjaro breaks things” is wrong because, while it does, we should just get over it. Hilarious.
• how does attacking the “detractors” address the claim that Manjaro breaks things?
• how does attacking the “detractors” address the claim that Manjaro breaks things?

I got in a lengthy back and forth with a Manjaro fan the other day where I repeatedly related the ways that Manjaro used to break on me and how that does not happen for me on vanilla Arch or EndeavourOS. They just kept coming back telling me that it could not have happened and, if I thought it could, that I did not understand how the AUR works. It was insane. Basically, this guy could not follow what I was saying to him. His response to his inability to understand the scenario that I was describing was to insult my intelligence and expertise.

Look loser. I don’t care if you believe me that your dog bites. I will continue to warn people and they can decide if they want to risk it or not.

webdev level of bs

Based

Wow, they haven't fucked up for more than a year? Is this some kind of record?

In short, the problems stem from the lack of repo sync at INSTALL time. Manjaro differs from every other Arch distro in terms of what packages are available when you install software from the AUR.

Which is completely irrelevant because AUR "packages" are only very loosely related to Arch binaries. Your average AUR is just a source package developed by someone who most likely doesn't use Arch, plus a thin wrapper script that says "it needs these packages to compile and these packages to run".

As users of source based distros like Nix and Gentoo will show you, you can get a well-made source package to compile and run on an extremely wide variety of system states (and also distros, architectures etc.)

The fact that binaries on Manjaro are a few weeks late is completely irrelevant for something compiled from source from a reasonably recent source package.

You seem to be under the impression that AUR packagers perform extensive testing. They don't. They run it once, if it works for them they publish. They did that weeks or months or in some cases years ago compared to the time you install. By which time the relevance of that test to Arch or Manjaro or any Arch distro is tenuous at best.

There is one case where an AUR package can fail installing, and that's if the packager has requested a dependency in a version that for some reason isn't available on your system. This can happen to Manjaro due to the delay but also to any other Arch distro depending on whether the user is willing and able get that version at that particular time. Not everybody is willing to drop everything and update three times a day.

The other thing that people can't seem to get through their head is that AUR packages will break eventually as the system binaries are updated. You have to recompile AUR packages when they break. This is the same for all Arch distros.

Suit yourself. I'm telling you that you're sleeping on one of the most user-friendly, up to date, gaming-ready, stable and generally hassle free distros out there, and it's coming from someone who actually tried all the popular ones.

In exchange you just have to stick to a LTS kernel and not replace critical system components from AUR. Which I think you'll agree are reasonable conditions for all Arch distros, heck, all distros.

Try it, don't try it, up to you.