The Manjaro community announced it has officially formed the Manjaro Project e.V., a German non-profit organization, taking it one step closer toward community management.
Manjaro was one of the first Arch-based Linux distros, and was the darling of the Linux world for several years. Unlike Arch and other Arch-based derivatives, Manjaro holds packages back for a couple of weeks. In theory, this gives time for any bugs to be discovered and fixed upstream before those bugs impact Manjaro’s user base. The distro also included a number of utilities that were designed to make managing an installation much easier than vanilla Arch, such as a graphical kernel manager and one of the best graphical package managers on any distro. Combined with a graphical installer, these features made Manjaro a popular option for users wanting an Arch-based distro without the headache that went with installing and maintaining a true Arch install.
Where Things Went Wrong
Unfortunately, Manjaro experienced a number of setbacks. Eventually, criticism arose because many users mistakenly thought Manjaro WAS Arch when, in fact, there are more differences between Manjaro and Arch than there are between Ubuntu and its upstream parent, Debian. Because many users didn’t understand this, they treated Manjaro as if it were Arch, which often resulted in issues.
Still other problems arose because of mismanagement. The project failed to renew its TLS certificates on multiple occasions, something that can and should be easily automated. On more than one occasion, Manjaro’s Pamac package manager inadvertently caused DDoS attacks against the Arch User Repository (AUR) because of improper search parameters.
These mismanagement issues have resulted in a fall from grace for Manjaro and led to the community wanting to take over management of the distro. This was outlined in the Manjaro 2.0 Manifesto, which was released in March, accusing project lead Philip Müller, though not by name, of consolidating control and being more concerned about commercial possibilities than the health of the distro. Since Müller was in charge of the commercial company behind Manjaro, the developers wanted to form a non-profit that would take over maintenance and governance of the distro, leaving Müller to pursue whatever commercial interests he wanted.
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.
Known issues — such as, for instance, the TLS certificates not being renewed in time — are simply ignored, despite multiple team members taking the initiative and volunteering, or even building tooling, processes and infrastructure to address these issues.
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 Manjaro Project is being run as one individual’s personal project, and everything is centralized around this single individual — an individual who refuses to share essential access to both the maintenance of the Project and the supporting infrastructure with the rest of the team.
A Major Step Forward
In a new post on the Manjaro forums, titled “The Manjaro Project e.V. is now official!”, the developers unveiled their progress in setting up a non-profit to oversee the distro’s future.
Dear Friends, Sympathizers, Relatives, In-Laws, Naysayers, Foes, Detractors, Tax Collectors, YouTube Talking Heads™, Reddit Trolls, and other potentially sentient beings monitoring this forum, :stuck_out_tongue:
It is my great privilege — and my equally great pleasure — to announce to you that the Manjaro Project e.V. is now an officially registered and fully legal non-profit organization in Germany, completely independent from the commercial Manjaro GmbH & Co KG company.
Without wanting to sound presumptuous, it is therefore my personal belief that the Manjaro Team would hereby have now provided sufficient evidence that continuity in the development and maintenance of the Manjaro GNU/Linux distribution is assured.
Despite its many missteps, and despite the rise of other popular Arch derivatives, like CachyOS, a well-maintained Manjaro offers plenty of value to existing and prospective users. In fact, this author spent a considerable amount of time on Manjaro several years ago, and found it to be one of the most trouble-free Linux distros in a list that includes openSUSE Tumbleweed, Fedora, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, KDE Neon, Tuxedo OS, Linux Mint, LMDE, Zorin OS, and Pop!_OS.
Hopefully the new non-profit will be able to restore Manjaro to its former glory.
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