Is Manjaro Done? Stick a Fork in It

A rebellion inside the Manjaro project, a community strike, and a threatened fork raise a hard question for users and contributors alike: is it time to rescue Manjaro, or walk away?

Everybody is not happy in the land of Manjaro, the popular Arch-based Linux distribution that comes out of Germany. From the looks of it, nobody is happy.

Manjaro is one of those distros that has a business side as well as a community side. As usually happens in these kinds of arrangements, the business side owns everything valuable — including trademarks and the like — even though the Manjaro community has been around longer than Manjaro GmbH & Co. KG, the official business name, and actually gave birth to the distro.

The long and short of it is that the community is rather perturbed at how the business side has been running things. What’s the gripe? The word “incompetence” seems to be in play. As does “control,” if you’re willing to suspend disbelief long enough to imagine that a business entity could possibly have control issues.

Evidently, this dissatisfaction from the community side has been brewing for a while, but things came to a head on March 9, when the community published the Manjaro 2.0 Manifesto on the project’s website. The manifesto was posted by a user with the handle Aragorn, who appears not only to be a community member, but also to be a part of Manjaro’s staff:

“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.”

That opening — actually the document’s second paragraph — seems to be on point. Currently, the distro occupies the eighth spot on DistroWatch’s Page Hit Ranking, the same as it did in January’s FOSS Force review, down from holding the second position in 2020.

The repeated mistakes the manifesto mentioned evidently start with the renewal of SSL certificates, not the most difficult issue to fix, but a headache when you suddenly can’t reach your site:

“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.”

In other words, there seems to be a whole lotta headbanging going on from the community side of the equation, and they’re starting to proclaim, “We’re not going to take it!”

Never did, and never will.

Manjaro Through the Eyes of the Manifesto

The manifesto characterizes the current leadership as centered on one individual who’s focused on turning Manjaro into a business, with decisions and access highly centralized around that person.

That person would be Philip Müller, who seems to be at the core of the issues associated with this palace intrigue. He’s the distro’s co‑founder and lead developer, as well as being the CEO and managing board member of Manjaro GmbH. In the discussion thread on the distro’s website about the manifesto, more than a few team members and community commentators describe the centralization and decision‑making problems as revolving around Müller in particular, rather than “the company” as a whole.
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“Time for Phil to let go and focus on the GmbH and let the community steer the OS,” wrote community assistant Teo on the day the manifesto went live. “He can only benefit from it in the long term because if the OS dies so does the GmbH too. An idea: if it goes to the next phase, it might be good to send this to some of the media like Phoronix and even some of the YouTube talking heads (I know we don’t like them, but they have a lot of followers).”

“That is the plan,” dennis1248 of the Manjaro Team replied. “Our friends over on YouTube love this type of content.”

The Manifesto’s Game Plan

The manifesto, which pretty much reads like a call to action, also includes the game plan that’s broken down into stages and phases.

First, the stages:

• Stage 0: We will await a reply within a reasonable timespan without taking any action.
• Stage 1: We will publicly release this document, and a general strike will commence. Nonessential distro and community efforts will be paused.
• Stage 2: We will consider forking and/or leaving the Manjaro Project as it currently stands.

Now the phases, which only apply to the first stage:

• Phase 1: Publish the document (manifesto) in the Internal Hub only (internal staff space).
• Phase 2: If still ignored after 48 hours, move the thread to the Member Hub (broader, still semi‑internal audience).
• Phase 3: If still ignored 48 hours after Phase 2, move the thread to Announcements (fully public), lock the forum read‑only, and keep the strike going.

With all phases of the first stage now complete and Müller evidently offering what are classified as stalling tactics on the discussion boards, it appears that tentative steps are being taken into the third stage.

Cue Thunderclap Newman.

The Proles in the Machine

So what do these post, post-hippie revolutionaries want? Well, like the countercultural revolutionaries of my generation, they basically want back what belongs to them, which basically boils down to their distro. They’ve turned what they want into something of a wish list to make sure everybody’s on the same page:

• The company to acknowledge the problems and commit to fixing them.
• Clear separation between “Manjaro the project” and “Manjaro the company,” with the project not controlled by a single person.
• Creation of a new legal entity (what the Germans call an eingetragener Verein or e.V., a registered association used for non‑profit, member‑driven organizations) that represents the project and community, distinct from the for‑profit company.
• Shared access to essential infrastructure (servers, TLS certs, repos, tooling) so work doesn’t bottleneck on one individual.
• A flatter, clearly defined governance structure with transparent decision‑making and voting rules for important changes.
• A healthier internal culture that retains and attracts contributors instead of driving them away.
• The ability for community contributors to steer the technical direction of Manjaro as an open‑source project.

The folks behind this peaceful palace coup say they’d prefer to avoid a fork if possible, but a fork will happen if the business side refuses to change. The community of course, follows the fork.

May the people prevail… uh I mean, we’ll see how it turns out.

Meanwhile, here’s some music to fork to, in case it’s needed…