Members of the Manjaro Linux distribution’s community have published a “Manjaro 2.0 Manifesto” that contains a list of complaints and a demand to restructure the project to provide a clear separation between the community and Manjaro as a company. The manifesto asserts that the project’s leadership is not acting in the best interests of the community, which has caused developers to leave and innovation to stagnate. It also demands a handover of the Manjaro trademark and other assets to a to-be-formed nonprofit association. The responses on the Manjaro forum showed widespread support for the manifesto; Philip Müller, project lead and CEO of the Manjaro company, largely stayed out of the discussion. However, he surfaced on March 19 to say he was “open to serious discussions”, but only after a nonprofit had actually been set up.
Manjaro is based on Arch Linux; the idea behind the distribution is to provide a user-friendly version of Arch that is focused on stability. Manjaro provides additional tools for system maintenance, and has its own software repositories. The distribution uses a rolling-release model, with three branches (stable, testing, and unstable) for users to choose from. It began as an installer for Arch Linux, created by Müller, Guillaume Benoit, and Roland Singer, which was first announced in 2011 on the Arch forum and operated as a volunteer-driven project. As the project became more popular, it began taking donations for server costs and other “special activities” in 2013. The first stable release, Version 15.09 (“Bellatrix”), was announced in September 2015.
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What nieche does Manjaro fill that others don’t don’t? Easier to use arch? Got Cachy Endeavour, Garuda. Maybe more tested packages? Isn’t it common to use AUR packages? That kinda messes with those and I think not trivial to fix
Before? It was the prominent “ergonomic” Arch Linux. But I’ve been burned by Manjaro enough that it would take a miracle for me to touch it again.
My experience is a few years out of date, but “more tested” was not the experience. It felt like they took the worst of Ubuntu and brought it to Arch: holding back packages enough to be annoying and tempt me to roll them forward/maintain stuff myself for fixes. But without any stability benefits of doing so. Stuff would break all the time and require manual intervention.
Manjaro got me to realize the Arch base is more “held back” than its reputation would suggest. The Arch maintainers do not roll out updates until every package works with every other package, and it turns out that ethos is incredibly hard to re-invent… which is what Manjaro ostensibly tries to do.
And yes. I can’t remember if AUR was a hard dependency, but it was certainly front-and-center. On Arch, you do not use AUR unless the package is self-contained (and therefore can fail to update without consequence) or if your system cannot function without it; and Manjaro didn’t exactly foster that caution. What’s more, many AUR packages were straight up broken since the base packages are different.