I was surprised to see an article about Manjaro in my news feed, and decided to humour the author a bit by skimming the article. There's a few things I'll pick up from it, but I think I've already exhausted the reasons why I use Manjaro enough times already.
While I've never tried installing Arch itself, I have tried Gentoo, and from what I know of installing Arch and installing Gentoo, I'm decently certain that installing Arch is faster and/or easier than Gentoo (remember that I gave up on installing Gentoo on the G5 after about 8 hours).
I've never really had any hardware issues in Manjaro, and the only Broadcom chip that I have that would cause an issue are the AirPort Extreme chips in Sae-chan and Taiga. Sure there's the Sound Blaster Z card in Melty, but meh. Not much else to say here.
PPAs... Ah, the bloody lovely world of PPAs... I remember adding a few when I was still using Linux Mint, and I think also when I briefly used Ubuntu. I do agree that it's not bad, but when you have a pile of them to add, it becomes fairly annoying. AUR is definitely a better "system", but if and only if the package gets maintained and not orphaned.
The rolling release is the main reason why I switched to Manjaro... From what I remember reading about it when I was trying to find something to replace openSUSE with, Manjaro described itself as somewhere between cutting and bleeding edge. As the article says, it's the newest stuff without breaking your system. I've not run into any major problems yet that required either a lot of work or just a clean install. Honestly the only problem I had so far was some
gstreamer0.10 packages that came from somewhere and had to be compiled from AUR, which eventually broke my sound, but was fixed by removing the packages.Switching kernels is usually not a huge priority for me, as I can usually run the latest stable kernel (the ones that don't say "experimental"), and have the kernel before it as a backup if something does happen to break (which hasn't so far).
I've not delved into the Manjaro community... Well, any communities in that matter. I've only delved into part of the Ubuntu and openSUSE communities once each to get an answer I wasn't able to find otherwise. In terms of Manjaro, I've found most of the answers I need on the Arch wiki to figure out things I'm trying to do or trying to find more about.
With friends that ask me where to start them on their Linux journey, I always point to Ubuntu and Linux Mint because of their large base and that both are the stereotypical distros to begin with. If they're looking for something a bit beyond that, that's probably when I would recommend openSUSE and Manjaro, as both serve me well (given that Tumbleweed on the Banana Pi could be better).
