Support us on Patreon
PayPalAt one point it seemed like Manjaro Linux would be the most popular Arch-based distribution, but after many missteps it appears to be at breaking point.
By now most people in the Linux sphere will have seen the issues - like how they have repeatedly let their SSL certificate expire bringing their entire website down. Something that is easily solved, but shows how the structure behind Manjaro is not particularly stable.
On the Manjaro Linux official forum, their team have put up a "Manjaro 2.0 Manifesto" with backing from multiple developers and people on their community team. They say that the leadership behind Manjaro does not line up with the actual developers and community involved in it, noting that Manjaro has become "one individual's personal project, and everything is centralized around this single individual" (the founder, Philip Müller) and how the attempts to turn it into a business have mostly failed and so they want to see big changes.
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.
Manjaro 2.0 Manifesto
What do they want? To split off Manjaro into two distinct entities: the company behind Manjaro (Manjaro GmbH & Co KG) and a new non-profit registered association (e.V.). Along with lots of the project being transferred over to the non-profit org.
Going by the latest update they say the Manjaro founder, Philip Müller, is currently stalling things and so all those in favour of the proposal appear to be going on some sort of strike. And they may be looking to lock the entire official forum down until they get Müller on board.
Manjaro has been pretty messy for years, so it's nice to see some of their team and community are attempting to rebuild things with a stronger foundation.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
About the author - Liam Dawe
I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly checked on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly.
See more from me
See more from me
Some you may have missed, popular articles from the last month:
You can also find comments for this article on social media: All posts need to follow our rules. Please hit the Report Flag icon on any post that breaks the rules or contains illegal / harmful content. Readers can also email us for any issues or concerns.
20 comments
My son is on manjaro and his system breaks on every update. But apparently arch is "too complicated". 😆
5 Likes
That's interesting. I've been using it for over a year and haven't had any technical problems. That doesn't negate the organizational problems they clearly have though. It sounds like this change will be for the best, assuming it survives at all. Thankfully, there are plenty of Linux choices out there, and it's pretty easy to move on to another.
5 Likes
TheLinuxPleb 8 hours ago
Would suck to lose Manjaro. It's basically Arch, but with the Stable branch you can update every time when there is an update. You don't have the same sort of commodity with Arch where with updates stuff can easily break so you have to postpone updates and look info from packages a lot.
Same goes with CachyOS. There can be breakage happening on those much more easy.
Something that is Arch and postpones updates and have testing for those is much wanted IMO.
Ive been basically years with Manjaro and it has been rock solid for me. Would be sad to see it go.
Same goes with CachyOS. There can be breakage happening on those much more easy.
Something that is Arch and postpones updates and have testing for those is much wanted IMO.
Ive been basically years with Manjaro and it has been rock solid for me. Would be sad to see it go.
5 Likes
inlinuxdude 7 hours ago
I've had the same install of Manjaro on my main PC for over 10 years (throughout a system rebuild with new motherboard). I've had a couple of breakages, but nothing insurmountable, overall its been pretty stable... (TBH, I did try to move off Manjaro a few years ago, but had some weird issue with the calamares installer which all the distros I wanted to use employed, so I just ended up staying on Manjaro)
3 Likes
fenglengshun 7 hours ago
My experience with Manjaro had been pleasant back then - there were some issues with libcrypto migration and some updates had had some issues, but never something more than a quick snapshot rollback + reupdate wouldn't fix (well, aside for an issue after 8 month of not upgrading as my PC was left at home but that's just a known Arch issue).
What made me stop was the way they removed, restored, and then removed some codecs without adequate dialogue and then not mentioning it in the updates announcement. Between that, and the various management mishaps, I just chose to move to Universal Blue, then Bazzite, and now CachyOS.
I think their community is right in wanting to break away, though I would say making a new distro without the associated branding of Manjaro that is just toxic now.
What made me stop was the way they removed, restored, and then removed some codecs without adequate dialogue and then not mentioning it in the updates announcement. Between that, and the various management mishaps, I just chose to move to Universal Blue, then Bazzite, and now CachyOS.
I think their community is right in wanting to break away, though I would say making a new distro without the associated branding of Manjaro that is just toxic now.
1 Likes
I love the idea of Manjaro - Arch, but with milestones (stable releases). It sounds like the power of Arch, but without the constant fear that every update will bring issues. And pamac - lovely. They've actually addressed one of the biggest issues (for me) of Arch.
But now that I'm on CachyOS with its built-in Snapper/BTRFS integration, I have that comfort anyway. If I do an update and my system has issues, I just reboot and choose the snapshot before the upgrade via Grub. Easy.
I still miss Pamac though. I haven't looked to see if it's portable to a generic Arch install.
I hope Manjaro get their organisational ducks in a row. It would be great to see what they could achieve without constantly having to fight internally with each other.
But now that I'm on CachyOS with its built-in Snapper/BTRFS integration, I have that comfort anyway. If I do an update and my system has issues, I just reboot and choose the snapshot before the upgrade via Grub. Easy.
I still miss Pamac though. I haven't looked to see if it's portable to a generic Arch install.
I hope Manjaro get their organisational ducks in a row. It would be great to see what they could achieve without constantly having to fight internally with each other.
3 Likes
Quoting: pbMy son is on manjaro and his system breaks on every update. But apparently arch is "too complicated". 😆You're exaggerating, don't you? ^^
Like many others, It works pretty well for me and I'm using it for 10+ years, so pretty stable in my eyes. Usually when it breaks it's my fault, not really Manjaro's. I'm on XFCE, it seems to be the most stable of all, the KDE folks did have some issues more than once though.
I hope positivity comes out of this, I'm happy with Manjaro and don't plan to change right now.
2 Likes
Quoting: CyrilMaybe a bit. 😇 But he's updating 1-2 times a year and there are always some conflicts and I need to help him fix it. ;-) Last time I rebuilt the mirror list so hopefully the next update will go more smoothly.Quoting: pbMy son is on manjaro and his system breaks on every update. But apparently arch is "too complicated". 😆You're exaggerating, don't you? ^^
0 Likes
Manjaro's only real selling point is that it's Arch with an installer, and I ran it for a while just for that. But I feel like much better alternatives exist for that today, including Arch itself having better installers.
2 Likes
Sadly this has been coming for a long while. Users have been declining, the contributors have been leaving, management has been a disaster. as @scaine said, with cachy doing what it does nowadays, I would just recommend that over Manjaro to any other user looking for arch flavorings.
0 Likes
buckysrevenge 5 hours ago
Another one here where I switched to Manjaro about 6 years ago for more frequent updates but stable ones. I've only had one major bad update, but their forums were helpful with getting the system back up without reinstalling from scratch (note: I did not read the release notes before diving in; never again).
At this point my laptop is old and I barely use it for gaming, so I'm not keen on it having closer to cutting edge kernels and drivers. Most of my regular software is through Flatpak so I'm really only dependent on Manjaro for security and desktop environment updates anyway. If I need to switch to a new distro, I won't be very picky as long as updates keep downtime very low since my wife generally uses the laptop now because she likes the big screen.
At this point my laptop is old and I barely use it for gaming, so I'm not keen on it having closer to cutting edge kernels and drivers. Most of my regular software is through Flatpak so I'm really only dependent on Manjaro for security and desktop environment updates anyway. If I need to switch to a new distro, I won't be very picky as long as updates keep downtime very low since my wife generally uses the laptop now because she likes the big screen.
3 Likes
Maybe they can do a spinoff light weight version and call it mounjaro
1 Likes
Quoting: scaineI still miss Pamac though. I haven't looked to see if it's portable to a generic Arch install.it's available via the AUR. pamac-all is probably the one you want
0 Likes
In the past, I was quite interested in the Manjaro promise. I tried it 3 times, on 2 different devices. Eventually, something always broke, and the system would become unusable. Then, I started seeing various criticisms about security concerns, and I thought that something isn't quite right with the distro.
Nowadays, I'm very happy with Fedora.
Nowadays, I'm very happy with Fedora.
0 Likes
Personally I have ran manjaro without any real issues on my gaming computer for roughly 8 years, my work computer for 6 years and I have a laptop that runs manjaro and I frequently test computers with it. To date it has grenaded itself twice for no fault of mine. I _HAVE_ absolutely messed it up a few times going "I am fairly sure this'll explode if I try this but... I'll try this" and lo and behold, it ded. But I think I've had to reinstall once.
Sure there are issues of forgetting to set things up before switching GPU from AMD to Nvidia and all that but all of those are not the distros fault, but mine :P
So personally I hope Manjaro stays a chugging, I know I probably could install something else with ease, but also... I kinda just wanna keep running the thing that has ran for yonks
Sure there are issues of forgetting to set things up before switching GPU from AMD to Nvidia and all that but all of those are not the distros fault, but mine :P
So personally I hope Manjaro stays a chugging, I know I probably could install something else with ease, but also... I kinda just wanna keep running the thing that has ran for yonks
0 Likes
I regretted that the Manjaro team chose to drag its feet on Manjaro Summit.
https://forum.manjaro.org/t/manjaro-summit-public-alpha-now-available/176995
https://forum.manjaro.org/t/manjaro-summit-public-alpha-now-available/176995
0 Likes
Caldathras 2 hours ago
Quoting: pbQuoting: CyrilMaybe a bit. 😇 But he's updating 1-2 times a year and there are always some conflicts and I need to help him fix it. ;-) Last time I rebuilt the mirror list so hopefully the next update will go more smoothly.Quoting: pbMy son is on manjaro and his system breaks on every update. But apparently arch is "too complicated". 😆You're exaggerating, don't you? ^^
That's probably part of the problem for him. Manjaro needs to be updated more frequently than once or twice a year. Also, turning off the AUR prior to updates also helps to prevent breakage, I'd found.
I used Manjaro for about two years before I left for Pop!_OS (and later, Linux Mint). Support for legacy Nvidia GPUs was very poor and management had a very crappy attitude towards its community/users. For me, the proposed opt-out telemetry was the final straw.
I think the big part of the problem for me was not realizing that a rolling or semi-rolling distro is not really all that ideal for legacy hardware. Old hardware needs a more stable, less cutting-edge, environment, in my opinion.
Last edited by Caldathras on 16 Mar 2026 at 5:49 pm UTC
1 Likes
Manjaro was once a brilliant distro and the Linux ecosystem wouldn't be where it is without it, but the past few years have been disastrous for the distro. I'd love for the distro to solve its issue and be anew what it was in 2015.
0 Likes
My current Manjaro install has been stable for ages, but I get it.
I wont install Manjaro again, I dont usally recommend it. Too uncertain, too many unfixed bugs(mostly small ones though), too much blaming the end user, even if they hooped trough so many hoops to report issues upstream.
I once even donated to them... I dont have any strong feelings, but well it will be Mint or Arch+Hyprland for me next, we will see how it goes.
I wont install Manjaro again, I dont usally recommend it. Too uncertain, too many unfixed bugs(mostly small ones though), too much blaming the end user, even if they hooped trough so many hoops to report issues upstream.
I once even donated to them... I dont have any strong feelings, but well it will be Mint or Arch+Hyprland for me next, we will see how it goes.
0 Likes
StalePopcorn 11 minutes ago
I hope it works out. I wonder how switching from a current installation to choosing either the non-profit release or business-oriented release would go.
0 Likes
How to setup OpenMW for modern Morrowind on Linux / SteamOS and Steam Deck
How to install Hollow Knight: Silksong mods on Linux, SteamOS and Steam Deck