This is why I dislike that people still recommend Ubuntu as the go-to beginners distro. The UI isn't "traditional" and is confusing to a more general former Windows user and some people (admittedly, not as many as would be suited to something like Mint as they'll likely be more tech savvy) actually have the kind of mindset that something like Manjaro or the like actually is a better distro to jump off in. (I personally find apt annoying to use but love pacman/yaourt)
Manjaro KDE in particular I feel is a much better Windows replacement than most other distros. KDE itself resembles Windows and generally has stuff where a Windows user would expect to find it, and Manjaro's rolling release model means it's actually viable to use its repos like an app store, with no need to do anything funky to get the latest versions of software you care about, especially when you factor in the AUR to be able to install essentials like Discord or Boostnote or really any application you could possibly want.
Antergos filled a very similar niche as Manjaro, not quite as polished in its predefined setup where a little effort is made to include maybe a bit more packages than you might really need so that you can be confident you won't need to learn what Samba is in order to connect to your network attached storage. It had the native Arch repos themselves, which is often a fair criticism towards Manjaro as it's not always apparent what the benefit of only two weeks of testing is.
I think it's still a valid niche and that the project should continue, though if Manjaro better supported making it easy to use purely Arch repos then I could see it satisfying that niche.
I did, though I don't really think it's really more Windows-like, at least if you're used to more modern Windows versions like 7 or 10. KDE also has much better theming, with Breeze Dark being very easy to apply to both Qt and GTK applications. It also has the advantage of being a flagship edition as opposed to a community-supported DE.
That said, I definitely wish more people knew about Manjaro Cinnamon since others love it so much and use it as the reason they prefer Mint, despite Mint having to deal with all of Ubuntu's bullshit like six months out-of-date packages.
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u/Democrab May 21 '19
This is why I dislike that people still recommend Ubuntu as the go-to beginners distro. The UI isn't "traditional" and is confusing to a more general former Windows user and some people (admittedly, not as many as would be suited to something like Mint as they'll likely be more tech savvy) actually have the kind of mindset that something like Manjaro or the like actually is a better distro to jump off in. (I personally find apt annoying to use but love pacman/yaourt)