Honestly the damage is done. Manjaro has been an instant no from me dog for a long time. The name carries a negative connotation. Trust has eroded.
Manjaro Linux Team Goes on Strike, Threatens to Fork the Project
Submitted 14 hours ago by throws_lemy@lemmy.nz to technology@lemmy.world
https://itsfoss.com/news/manjaro-team-strike/
Comments
zewm@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
rabber@lemmy.ca 13 hours ago
What happened?
Addv4@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
Plenty of things, but the most obvious being the two separate instances they had issues with renewing their certs.
1984@lemmy.today 4 hours ago
Aragorn writes that Philip Müller (the project lead) has been running Manjaro as his own personal venture rather than a community effort, keeping a tight hold on access to both the codebase and the infrastructure.
These weasels never care about the actual thing that is being built, its just a way to make money for them.
Hope they kick that Philip guy out and stop making this thing a business.
Kazel@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 hours ago
Burn it down
spez@sh.itjust.works 14 hours ago
Good for them! A second TLS problem after what happened last time is unacceptable. I hope the ‘mutiny’ succeeds.
somehacker@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
Pretty sure this wasn’t the second
Eldritch@piefed.world 13 hours ago
And even that was only the most visible yet surface level one of their problems.
UnfortunateShort@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
It wasn’t.
BlackLaZoR@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
Looks like a decent plan. I’ll have no problem with supporting non-profit
arsCynic@piefed.social 13 hours ago
Just fork already. EndeavourOS exists, an awesome distro, so this threat is a triviality.
Samskara@sh.itjust.works 2 hours ago
If I were a Manjaro dev, I would just jump ship to EndeavourOS, Cachy, or Garuda.
rhubarbe@tarte.nuage-libre.fr 6 hours ago
Except that I want the same release cycle as Manjaro. The only equivalent I have found so far seems to be OpenSuse Slowroll, in beta for the past 2 years.
Adderbox76@lemmy.ca 8 hours ago
I started using Manjaro long before all this crap started going down, and I’ve been holding on hoping this all gets sorted because I hate distto hopping.
But sadly I don’t think its going to happen. I’ve got a new PSU coming to fix a burnt out one that has left my desktop turned off and unupdated for two months. Might be time for an install of something new rather than updating afterwards.
alsimoneau@lemmy.ca 1 hour ago
I moved to endeavour. With the same de it feels very similar.
taiyang@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
It’s indeed the time. I found Cachy was a good pivot, similar feel but seems to work better overall. Manjaro is still based on Arch after all, technically.
RipLemmDotEE@lemmy.today 8 hours ago
I along started with Manjaro, but it’s broken mess. I moved to Garuda and it has been completely solid and stable for over a year.
Samskara@sh.itjust.works 3 hours ago
Garuda is pretty great if you want a nice experience out of the box. Can recommend.
sem@piefed.blahaj.zone 9 hours ago
A significant portion of the Manjaro team has signed a manifesto demanding the project split from its parent company and restructure as a non-profit.
Sourav Rudra 18 Mar 2026
Manjaro has long been one of the more popular Arch-based Linux distributions, known for making Arch Linux more accessible to everyday users. But it has been losing ground for years, both in terms of user trust and active contributors, and the complaints about its direction have only gotten louder.
Now, things have hit a breaking point, with calls for a fork if the current leadership does not budge.
A Manjaro team member going by the handle “*Aragorn*” has published the “Manjaro 2.0 Manifesto” on the official Manjaro forum. The post lays out a detailed restructuring plan for the project that has been signed by 19 team members, including developers, community managers, moderators, and the company’s technical lead.
Is there any weight behind this?
Manjaro 2.0 Synopsis This document covers the organizational, technical, management, and other changes we (the Manjaro Team, et al) like to see applied to the Manjaro Project. The goal of this document is to serve as a point of discussion, and ultimately, once a consensus on its contents and written goals has been reached, as a guide for the organizational restructuring of the Manjaro Project. Motivation The Manjaro Project has been declining over the past decade. It managed to sustain a sizable user base, yet it stagnated, lost trust, lost almost all of its contributors, and even became a laughingstock for repeatedly making the same mistakes and never even attempting to address these known issues.The manifesto opens by stating that the Manjaro Project has been declining over the past decade, losing trust and contributors while repeating the same mistakes without ever addressing them.
One example cited is the repeated failure to keep TLS certificates current, something volunteers had reportedly already built tooling to fix, only to be ignored.
From there, it goes after the core issue directly. Aragorn writes that Philip Müller (*the project lead*) has been running Manjaro as his own personal venture rather than a community effort, keeping a tight hold on access to both the codebase and the infrastructure.
Aragorn goes on to say that:
The priorities of the Project leadership do not align with those of the developers and community. The current leadership’s goal is to turn Manjaro into a successful business, and thus far, these attempts have mostly failed.
The money situation makes it worse. The manifesto says the company, Manjaro GmbH & Co KG, has not been funneling any of its funds back into the project and has not pursued outside funding either. *What the team wants is a clean separation, where the Manjaro Project is spun off from Manjaro GmbH & Co. KG and restructured as a registered nonprofit association under German law (e.V.).
The new structure would distribute ownership equally among members, use transparent voting for major decisions, and assign “*arbiter*” roles to experienced contributors for specific domains.
Under the proposal, the nonprofit would get full use of the Manjaro trademark through 2029. The company keeps the right to use it too, as long as the two don’t step on each other’s toes. After that initial period, the manifesto nudges the company to declare that **it is willing to hand over full trademark ownership to the nonprofit for €1.
Key assets like the GitHub organizations, the self-hosted GitLab instance, forum, CDN, and the *manjaro.org domain would all move over to the non-profit as well. *The team has also laid out what would happen if they were ignored. The “Our Resolve” section of the manifesto says that *there are three stages (*from 0-2*): waiting for a reply, striking and going public, and finally forking or leaving. Within *Stage 1*, there are three phases that control how public the document gets.
They skipped Phase 2 and jumped straight to Phase 3 a few days ago, moving the manifesto to the public *Announcements section of the forum and archiving the thread on archive.org. If things don’t improve, then a forum lockdown is on the table. Don’t think that this is some kind of witch hunt. One of the Manjaro team members, Dennis ten Hoove, has clarified that the goal of this initiative is not to kick people off the project but to change the leadership and help foster Manjaro as a healthy community-driven project.
Expect a bumpy transition
@dennis1248 had sent me a draft proposal for a possible restructuring of Manjaro project in advance via a DM and told me, that it might be formally submitted by the community to me at a later state. With this post here on the internal hub, it now seems that the community has serious intentions to actually found a non-profit association (German Verein/e.V) and push ahead with a split from the company. Before the company was founded, there had already been suggestions and discussions to establish an association or other forms of legal entity to make the Manjaro project more sustainable. Ultimately, the current corporate structure was chosen as the only legal entity, known as the Manjaro GmbH & Co. KG company. The company has already provided significant financial support to the project in the past and has also employed various Manjaro developers on a freelance basis since 2019 using company funds. I have no personal objections on the subject of founding an association to separate the project from the company. However, at this time, I will not be personally involved in any founding processes of this new legal entity. In this regard, association members should not be involved in the company in any way. Any transfers of company assets or infrastructure require close consultation with the company and yet to be established new legal entity, in order to ensure that the interests of both parties are safeguarded as amicably and smoothly as possible. Any actions that could damage the business must be ruled out. To ensure the smooth operation of the company, assets relevant to the company will remain within the company. Finally, I would like to note that any actions or comments that could damage the business or reputation of myself or the company should be refrained from in order to ensure a mutually agreeable process and avoid legal actions.Philip did break his silence on the matter, saying that **he is fine with an association being formed but wants no part in setting one up himself. He also made clear that handing over any assets would need to happen on the company’s terms and closed with a warning that public statements damaging to either himself or the business could have legal consequences.
The protesting team’s response was measured, where Aragorn pushed back, pointing out that the manifesto already lets the company continue using the infrastructure for as long as it needs to move its operations elsewhere.
Roman Gilg, who signed the manifesto despite being the company’s CTO, put a direct question to Philip, asking whether he had any specific objection to the list of assets outlined in the document. Philip went quiet again.
After days of silence on that question, Aragorn declared that Philip was stalling and announced the team was skipping Phase 2 and moving straight to Phase 3 (*where things stand as of now*).
What can you do?
There’s an active community discussion thread with over 200 replies, started specifically to accommodate talks surrounding the manifesto. If you have thoughts on what’s going wrong with the Manjaro project and what could be done better, you can head over and weigh in.
One of the Manjaro old timers, Stefano Capitani, has recently posted there, sharing his view of the situation:
I have to apologize to all of you. It seems I’ve missed some of the events here. I believe, without fear of contradiction, that I, along with @guinux , @oberon , and of course @philm, am one of the “old timers” still active, if not as much as before, but still active in Manjaro.
I have to be honest, I feel like I’m having flashbacks because we’ve already had these discussions or “storms” in the past. We’ve always come out stronger, and we’ll come out stronger this time too.
*PS: You need to be logged in to the Manjaro forum to view user profiles.
ChunkMcHorkle@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
Thank you for writing this up, as someone not familiar with what’s going on over there I really appreciate you taking the time.
sem@piefed.blahaj.zone 9 hours ago
BigTrout75@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
Huh, that’s too bad. I used it for years to get comfortable with an rolling release arch distro. I thought it was good, but it would break from time to time. Thankfully, Arch is easy to install and maintain these days.
filister@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
Manjaro was quite messy last time I tried it a couple of years ago.
org@lemmy.org 13 hours ago
Just quit and move to CatchyOS
Joelk111@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
Distros? Gotta catch them all.
ChilledPeppers@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 hours ago
Damn what a catchy name snaps fingers
texture@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
gaurda is what manjaro should have been. its perfect for noobs with snapper in grub ootb.
i also like envdeavor anc cachy too
MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 1 hour ago
Garuda and Endeavour OS btw.
goatinspace@feddit.org 10 hours ago
Reddfugee42@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
But at least they lost all that weight. Good for them.
nutsack@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 hours ago
The only reason I went with manjaro this last time is because I had my arch Linux install adventure already and I just wanted my computer to work. is there an install script that just works now?
Ricaz@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 hours ago
There is archinstall which does everything for you. If you don’t wanna do anything yourself though, just check out CachyOS or EndeavourOS
BremboTheFourth@piefed.ca 11 hours ago
I just switched from Bazzite to Cachy today. For some reason my disk space got… clogged, with Bazzite? Filelight was no help so I backed everything up, wiped the disk, installed Cachy, replaced my files, and the disk went from being nearly full to only using 600GB. Still not sure what happened there.
Cachy, meanwhile, has asked me to update 4 times in the 4 hours I’ve been using it. Which is fine, I get that Arch is rolling release, but now on the 4th update it keep failing for some reason. Also I can’t have my headphones and speakers plugged in at the same time or my speakers don’t work.
Sigh. All this KDE stuff is nice and flashy, and my games have worked with both Bazzite and Cachy, so I appreciate that, but damn is it tough for me to make a Linux recommendation to anyone else that isn’t just “use Mint, it’s stable.” Anything more in depth turns into a mini essay (see above!)
orlyowl@piefed.ca 12 hours ago
EndeavourOS is very close to being vanilla arch with sane defaults. I run it on multiple machines and it’s rock solid.
upbeatdingo@piefed.world 12 hours ago
I’ve used Archinstall without issue a couple times now. I get why it might not fit every use case or seem as intuitive to others as it does to me but I’ve enjoyed using it.
MCHEVA4EVA@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
I tried to use Archinstall but I was installing on a partition on a secondary drive and I couldn’t get it to go in the right place so I just did it the long way. It’s really not that hard but I can see how it’s a bit daunting if you’ve never done it before. Archinstall seems like it would be good if you where installing it as the main os.
nutsack@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 hours ago
yeah something like this is what I’m talking about. when I set up my laptop I followed a Reddit post by someone who had the same model. it wasn’t difficult by any means but it took a while to get everything configured.
Manjaro comes with a shitload of stuff that I don’t need and I end up ripping out a lot of it and disabling services
Jesus_666@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
In addition to what has been mentioned already, Garuda is an Arch derivative where convenience is the whole point. No install scripts, just your usual live ISO with a Calamares installer plus a bunch of convenience utilities once you’re set up.
It’s not exactly lightweight by default but it does make for a very comfortable Arch experience.
Pricklesthemagicfish@reddthat.com 11 hours ago
Garuda was actually my first distro. Smooth as butter lol I still remember thinking why are there 3 different version.
5715@feddit.org 12 hours ago
What would happen if Kent Overstreet and Philip Müller met?
db2@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
Kent has a digital girlfriend bro, have some respect.
asudox@lemmy.asudox.dev 5 hours ago
he’s at the pinnacle of AGI invention
ZombieCyborgFromOuterSpace@piefed.ca 11 hours ago
So…. Open Manjaro?
dogs0n@sh.itjust.works 9 hours ago
Manjourno
mlg@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
The fact that CachyOS more or less successfully replaced Manjaro’s purpose I guess is evidence of Manjaro’s issues.
I forgot but I think Bazzite had similar complaints (due to its use of silverblue) in which case it was just more straightforward to use Fedora or OpenSUSE if you don’t want to work with the read only root system.
Downstream distros need to bring additional value to the table to be worth using, otherwise there’s really no need if you can make a package group that accomplishes the same thing in one go.