well there is a terrible turmoil escalated. a lot of developers and maintainers including the cto who shares 50% of manjaro is trying to take over manjaro in the whole. i’ve never seen such a dispute in the linux-universe before. just to remind everyone, manjaro is a commercial distro by german law with phillip mueller as owner. there is a long dispute about the lack of manjaro and it’s financial contributing that escalated now. the members try to force phil mueller to handover the whole access to the servers, repos and even the domain of manjaro. sad to see how this great distro seems to vanish now.
You seem to assume we know all the context. I googled a bit, but didn’t find anything.
Never used it, but it sounds like Manjaro was an attempt to make rolling Arch a bit less rolling.
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Thanks for posting. It seems they are open about the issues then.
I never used Manjaro (heard too many bad things about stability) and I’m too stupid to use Arch. (not using Arch, btw). Please correct me if I’m wrong:
Manajaro seems to have failed with making Arch more accessible by making the rolling distro one, that is a bit delayed. This is unlike Cachy OS, that basically still are Arch. And staying closer to the true primary distro, seems better.
I think when Manjaro started, there were no other significant GUI Arch distros. So that “looks like a noob distro” made it appealing (until the bugs came)
A fork either just stays close to the primary distro, making the fork pointless. Or they make significant changes, but then they need huge resources to maintain the fork. i see the same issues with all the Ubuntu forks.
I also think the Linux community is funny for hating Canonical for being a company, and then ignore the fact, many of the distros of the week (Zorin, Manjaro) also are companies.
Like to hear more, or like to be corrected if my assumptions are wrong.
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i wouldn’t call it failed. yes manjaro had always the mood to stay a little bit behind the actual arch-repos to prevent the biggest crashes but that isn’t the problem. manjaro had its flaws in the last 3-4 years cause the packaging of the repos itself caused a lot of hick-ups, the maintaining of bugs in the repos was slow and caused irritations. but as a user of manjaro for over a decade: every distro has it’s ground-hog-days and you’ll get used with it. this destructive turmoil at manjaro is about power, influence and financial dispute. you might think that the devs and maintainer are the “good” in this game but the more you’re investigating the more it seems that this is the trial to simply hijack the distro.
I should have phrased that better. I have no idea what their userbase or situation is.
I meant, they went from being hyped a few years ago, to being shunned for the all the bugs/issues. And the new hyped distros (Cachy, Bazzite etc.) seem to be better.
Maybe they didn’t get worse, but the competition got better (or appeared to begin with).
And maybe the whole idea of “delaying” rolled release is inherently flawed. Each primary distro (Fedora, Ubuntu LTS, Debian, Arch) has a release cycle for their reasons. And typically any fork mimics that cycle. That saves resources and prevents duplication of work. If you change that release cycle, you need HUGE resources for QC and timeliness. and forks usually don’t have resources for that (which is why they fork to begin with)
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Back when Manjaro started, it was a sort of viewed (rightly or not) as a replacement for the arch gui installer project whose name I can’t remember.
When Manjaro came to be, there was a legitimate argument against Arch’s ease of use. You had to basically manually install it, and the only thing that was automated about the process was bootstrapping the system, with pacstrap. You had to manually partition, create a user, install the bootloader, choose a desktop environment, all that. It was very challenging for new users. And to add to that, Arch regularly had bugs in packages.
Today, however, Arch is really solid. It’s rolling, yes, but it’s not as bleeding edge. I think most of that can lie on system packages becoming far more stable, and the ecosystem maturing as a whole, but the arch maintainers have done a lot to help that as well. They also released archinstall, which is a TUI installer, and having used it numerous times (and guided a friend through the install as his first foray into Linux), I can say it’s come a long way.
For this reason, I struggle to see a place in the market for Manjaro as a whole.
I don’t dislike Canonical for being a company. I dislike canonical for their silly directional decisions. When Wayland was starting to become viable, they chose to develop Mir. When Flatpak was maturing, they released Snap. When the community was hating on Windows for showing ads in the desktop, they partnered with Amazon to show ads.
I can’t objectively explain it, but subjectively, I think a lot of the community felt betrayed by Canonical.
Absolutely this.
Once a year or so, I have to manually do something with pacman on Arch. It doesn’t generally break my system, but I have to check the Arch announcements an it will say something like “manual intervention required for package foo” in a recent announcement. It happens seldom enough that I get confused for a minute and forget to check the announcements page, but that’s arguably a point in favor of the stability of Arch.
I would argue this. Manjaro was never terribly stable, but it was more stable than Arch in 2015-2017. fast forward to about 2021 and Arch really hit it’s stride in stabiliity, and then two years ago, archinstall released.
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This is what I like about manjaro. It isn’t “as rolling” as arch, because they have releases that update lots of packages at once, instead of updating everything every time a new version is available. This can be better for stability but can still cause issues, which it did on multiple occasions on my ~6 months on it. Also by using the AUR for some packages, you are basically inviting even more trouble, as those packages are being updated while the core packages are being held back by the manjaro repos.
I remember these arguments and issues with finances from back in 2022 when I was using it as well. It’s sad to see that they are still having these conflicts inside the project.
I would never claim to like an OS that seems to cause problems that frequently. Between home and work I use multiple W11 PCs which never really have a problem. And a Linux distro with frequent issues would be replaced by a better distro in no time.
What you describe sounds more like an experimental OS for tinkerers, not for production or gaming.
If tinkering is your hobby, that is fine. But I’m amazed how much pain users can endure and consider normal.
I never used Manjaro (and never will), but what you describe sounds like what I read a lot. I’m curious about actual user base and if they lost or gained users over the last years.
Yeah, stability was definitely not one of the pro’s of manjaro for me, hence I moved away from it after just 6 months. Part of the issues were the typical issues you will encounter on arch, like keys expiring and requiring you to manually update them, which doesn’t happen on any other distro except the arch based ones, to my knowledge. Part of it was the fact that I used the AUR for some packages, causing partial upgrades (which are not supported in arch), when upgrading too soon. One time I lost the decryption keys to my encrypted system but I think this was because I removed an external drive while updating the kernel, which messed up the UUID’s of the drives, and I had to use the iso to recover the keys.
If you stick with the manjaro repos, you are probably going to have a better time in general than on regular arch, but will still inevitably face the same issues as with arch, like the expired keys.
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same for me, i need the aur for some specific applications from time to time. my main problem is one pc i’m running now since 2017 with the same manjaro-install. i’ve installed such a lot by the time that it will last weeks if ever to replace it with a different os underlying but imho manjaro has no future at the moment and i’m very sceptic that this rage between the crew and the owner of manjaro can be solved in a peaceful manner.
i never thought about replacing manjaro, i got used how it handles the separation of basic and aur packages and facing the problem that i have to rethink the usage on another arch-based os but it is as it is. i’m already searching for a proper replacement of manjaro but what distro can be used ? manjaro had a lot of advantages that i preferred about others:
a) manjaro had a financial background of a company and was independent of donations. that gave me the safety that this distro is not vanishing cause some hobbyists suddenly retire and the distro vanishes. (bad conclusion afterwards)
b) it had to comply with the european digital-laws as distro with that commercial background in europe (safer than a distro outside of europe)
these are two important things and i’m curious what arch-based distro can be a replacement that can give me some trust although it can’t be the same as manjaro was in it. it should be a european distro at least.
any suggestions of distro ?
I am typing to you now on manjaro (cinnamon)…. this is bad news to hear
.
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I’m not sure theres any meaningful difference in what manjaro offers vs just using standard arch anymore.
Aur packages are already handled separately with helpers like yay
Arch now has an installer script you can use to automate the install in many common configurations.
If you’re looking for something more friendly and with a narrower scope of choices, cachyos is rapidly gaining traction. For those who want cinnamon in its best form, mint has been on the HWE kernel since 22.3 and so it has great hardware and software support.
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the technical focus is the same, there are some differences with this arch-distros but that shouldn’t bother me. that main thing is to find a distro that i can trust it will be alive even in some years. i’ve seen too many community-driven distros that were great but disapeared faster as they came up and it was always the same playbook: missing financial background cause funding didn’t worked, developer that left cause of family-reasons leaving the distro to die and last but not least dispute inside the devs-community.
as explained one of my pc’s will be a total headache to me cause i’m using this system since 2017 and it will last weeks to setup all the software and tweaks i did on it. i can still use it with manjaro but if things turn bad manjaro will disappear all of sudden (and all the signs point to this event). cachy-os is such a candidate i wanna circumvent. there is a lot of hype in it but this is such a typical candidate that is the new star in heaven but not for long. endeavour might be more reliable. it’s a european distro and is active for a longer time now. i’m out of options although there are such a lot distros avaiable, but endeavour is the only option that comes into mind actually but i’m always open to other tips for arch-based distros that can replace manjaro.
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this dispute went public this weekend. i don’t expect any fundamental news for today. we’ll see what is happening the next 1-2 weeks and if there is a future to the manjaro-project but my personal impression is that this project is close to the end. both sides suffer on fundamental problems. either phil mueller kicks out the team and lacks on personal or the devs take over but aren’t able to finance their vision. both scenarios will potentially doom the project.
i’m already checking plan b and prepare to switch to a different os and been searching for alternatives to use a arch-based system and to organize my base-system in a better way for maintaining.
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I’m a noob 
and you probbaly know all that.
But I read a lot that if you use Cachy, you can convert it to vanilla Arch. this is because Cachy itself doesn’t change anything like Manjaro does (delaying and testing packages). I don’t know about Endavour… but if that is the case and you use Cachy, and if Cachy disappears, you at least don’t end up with an orphan system.
I don’t know how many forks have a similar option. but I think most people then just bite the bullet and install a new OS.
How did the Manjaro GmbH actually make money? I suppose community distros (Mint, MX Linux) get donations. And corporate distros (Ubuntu, Fedora) get some community support, but mainly use the free desktop OS as a test bed for the paid enterprise products. Did Manjaro do any Enterprise stuff? GmbH or not, maintaining a good distro cost money. Same question could be asked about Zorin since I doubt many users use the paid Pro version. And if it is a company, not many users will want to donate to, unlike a 100% community project (Debian).
I’m as far away from ever being a Manjaro user as possible. But if I hear all the TLS certificate and bug drama, their reputation must be quite bad.
I’m curious if a new team will actually improve the issues relevant to the user.
Edit: and I realize, happy users don’t go to the Internet, but a few unhappy ones will and that skews the picture.
I’m also not sure what a “big distro” is. The much hyped Bazzite only has 70K users according to their data (look under “metrics”,not sure how they got it, from update pulls maybe?). If I see the hype, I would have guessed almost millions. I’d be curious how that compares to Kionite user base.
I know nothing, but my advise: pick one of the main branches (Debian, Fedora, Arch, maybe Suse) based on release model, use that distro directly. And if you choose a fork, thoroughly research their track record, community, size, documentation IF it actually is better than the original. If you bet on Fedora instead of a fork, you have nothing to lose. If Fedora disappears, thsoe forks are done for anyway.
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How odd all of this sounds. I have been using Manjaro for over three years now and have had zero problems. I do avoid using AUR. I picked this distro for the rolling updates and have been very pleased. I suppose if Manjaro goes away or becomes a problem I will switch to CachyOS (not likely since I want rolling updates) or Bazzite.
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This type of dispute isnt at all unprecedented. These sorts of things seem to happen every few years. It is how we get new forks or new distributions entirely, or how one shuts down. In the past we have had Monowall to OPNsense/pfsense drama, plus the continued drama between those two distributions. The closure of CentOS by Red Hat. OpenSUSE has almost had a couple times been on the verge of closure or fork/rebrand from drama both in its leadership and with the enterprise SUSE company. Seems like we almost entered this stage with Bazzite last year after all that drama between its founder and one of the developers, and again around the same time with its founder saying he would shut down the entire Bazzite project if Fedora dropped 32-bit program support. So it is possible Bazzite will shut down anyway in another year or two when that happens, if Steam/Valve doesnt get everything fully converted over to 64-bit in time.
Probably OpenSUSE is your closest bet for the same concept as Manjaro? OpenSUSE is based on Enterprise SUSE Linux, which is a commercial company. I believe OpenSUSE itself is a commercial company (edit: they are not, just looked it up), and both are based in Germany if Im not mistaken. And while I dont know a ton about OpenSUSE as it has been over a decade since I last used it, I believe OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is a rolling release version like Arch is. OpenSUSE itself does have commercial backing sill though, including by its parent release SUSE Linux Enterprise Gmbh, as well as major players like AMD:
https://en.opensuse.org/Sponsors
or possibly Fedora or Red Hat? Fedora is part of the RHEL project so has commercial support and is one of the longest running distros out there and now considered one of the “main” ones alongside Arch, Debian, and SUSE. RHEL is owned by IBM though which is American.
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After months of distro-hopping, where I though I had an issue with Manjaro, I found out that it was hardware problem. So after a system upgrade, I decided to get back to it, and alas, my problem was vanished.
Therefore, I am sticking with Manjaro, I do not care about politics, and as long as it works and gets updated, and they don’t spy on my, I don’t care who owns it.
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