A truce in the Manjaro governance struggle

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.

Müller announced in 2019 that he was forming a company in Germany with Manjaro core team member Bernhard Landauer. If that was discussed with the larger Manjaro community beforehand I have not found any evidence of it. The company was set up as a Kommanditgesellschaft (KG) called "Manjaro GmbH & Co. KG". Its stated goals were to improve the Manjaro infrastructure, become self-sustaining, and to hire additional contributors. It was also announced that the new company would hold the Manjaro trademarks in the EU and US "to prevent unauthorized use of Manjaro as a brand" while ensuring that the name could "always be used freely by the community". In 2024, the company announced that Landauer was leaving "to focus on other professional endeavors", and would be replaced by Roman Gilg as the chief technical officer.

Laptop-gate

The project has had some problems with the separation between company and community before now. Manjaro had already been taking donations for various activities before the formation of the company; funds were held in Müller's bank account. After the formation of the company, the funds for its community activities were moved to Open Collective. In 2020, after the split between company and community finances, there was a controversy over the purchase of a laptop from community funds.

Jonathon Fernyhough, who passed away in 2023, was serving as treasurer for Manjaro's community donations in 2020. He said that Müller had approved the purchase of a laptop by an unidentified third person against the project's written expense policy: Fernyhough rejected the expense. That led to his leaving his post as treasurer:

Phil was unhappy about the rejection and the additional questions about how community funds would be used. As a consequence I am no longer treasurer, leaving Phil in control of all funds once again. Phil is now in a position to use community funds as he sees fit in order to move the community project in the same direction as his company.

I will still be floating around the forum but at this point Manjaro doesn't seem all that friendly any more.

A forum post by Matti Hyttinen about Fernyhough's departure asserted that the laptop purchase was a legitimate expense, but the disagreement was solely about the process involved. It also said that Fernyhough's "position within the team became untenable" because of the way that he had expressed his disagreement about the handling of the expense. Fernyhough, though, called into question the way that community funds were being used, not just the failure to follow written process. He said that there was a definite conflict of interest with Manjaro GmbH "making deals with a hardware company to optimise Manjaro for laptops, then claiming expenses from community funds for laptops from that company to do development for that company."

Manifesto

Frank Vandermeiren made the manifesto public on March 9. It states that it is meant to be used as a focus for discussion and, ultimately, a guide for an organizational restructuring of the project. It describes separating the project from the company entirely and forming a nonprofit ("Manjaro e.V.") registered association. The Manjaro for-profit company would, over time, become a downstream of the project. The document also goes into some detail about how people would join the nonprofit association, how the decision-making process would work, and so forth.

The motivation given for this is that the project has "stagnated, lost trust, lost almost all of its contributors, and even became a laughingstock for repeatedly making the same mistakes" such as failing to renew SSL certificates in a timely fashion. The manifesto refers to "project leadership", rather than naming Müller directly, but also argues that Manjaro is "being run as one individual's personal project" with everything centralized around that person; it does not require much detective work to make the connection. It claims that Müller refuses to share access to supporting infrastructure for Manjaro with the rest of the project's team.

The Manjaro name is only used for its popularity, and the community is only used as guinea pigs and as unpaid workers, with as a result that the Project is severely suffering. As an example of this, no attempt is being made to acquire any funds for the Project, and the funds owned by the Manjaro GmbH & Co KG company are not being invested into the Project, with as a result that the Project's funds have now run out, causing Manjaro's only full-time developer to lose their only source of income.

We want the Manjaro Project to be revitalized, regain respect, attract contributors, and again provide meaningful value to the Open Source community.

The developer the manifesto is referring to seems to be Mark Wagie, though he does not seem to have been receiving full-time wages; according to the expenses page on Open Collective, he has regularly received payments from the project on an almost-monthly basis, totaling about €15,000, going back to October 2023. The Open Collective project page shows that Manjaro has raised a total of €87,556.13 since it joined, and has disbursed nearly €82,000 of that; it currently has a balance of less than €6,400. The project raised about €15,600 in the last 12 months via Open Collective; it does not appear that any of the funds came from the company.

Demands

In addition to its complaints and ideas about the future, the manifesto also makes a few demands. First, it says that the project expects the company to provide a license for use of the Manjaro trademark through 2029, while retaining the right to use the mark for its own products "as long as the Manjaro GmbH & Co KG company's use of the trademark does not cause any confusion" with the projects and such offered by the nonprofit. It also demands that the company declare its willingness to yield the trademark to the nonprofit entirely after 2029 for the price of one Euro.

On top of requiring the company to hand over the trademark, the manifesto demands that any assets or infrastructure "for which the Manjaro Project is its primary user" be handed over to the nonprofit. That includes the relevant GitHub organizations, Git repositories, Manjaro forum, manjaro.org domain, and more. The company is allowed to continue using the infrastructure "but is expected to actively work towards migrating as much as reasonably possible" and compensate the nonprofit for the usage costs. Further, the nonprofit would not guarantee that any shared services would be continued; the project could take down services or replace them without consulting the company first.

Finally, it states that if Müller ignores the manifesto, or does not make a serious attempt at "negotiating an acceptable compromise solution", the supporters will take action in stages. The first stage was simply to wait "a reasonable timespan" for a response; apparently he was given a copy of the manifesto privately around February 23. The second stage is to publicly release the document, which has obviously happened, and begin a "general strike"; the supporters of the manifesto will stop their "nonessential" work on the distribution and community efforts. The third stage is to "consider forking and/or leaving" the project.

The Manjaro web site lists a core team consisting of 17 people; at least six of those team members, including Gilg, have signed on in support of the manifesto. A few of the signatories have used only their forum usernames, so it is not clear whether those people are core team members. It also seems likely that some of the team are no longer active in the project, but have not been removed from the team list.

Reactions

Since the manifesto was made public on March 9, there have been more than 220 responses in a separate thread created specifically for the discussion. The first response, from Todor Uzunov, was completely in favor of the proposal: "The project is going down the drain as it is and is in many aspects poorly maintained. I was actually looking for alternative as a main daily OS because I cannot imagine this will survive another year or two." Koshika Surasena said that he whole-heartedly agreed with "all sentiments discussed and evident", but hoped that the community had not jumped the gun by going public. He worried that a public fight might harm the project, but noted that "waiting can only go for so long, and the project is definitely in a downward trend now".

Dennis ten Hoove, one of the manifesto's signatories, elaborated on the claims that the distribution had stagnated in the past five years or so. Manjaro had once had a "sizable group of people" contributing between five and ten years ago, but only two remained active with "maybe another 2 people picking up small stuff every now and then". He complained that there are "piles of issue reports being unaddressed" and pointed out that the work on Manjaro Arm has stalled. Releases for Arm seem to have stopped in early 2023; the images offered on the download page are from the 23.02 release, which was announced in February 2023. He also voiced concern about core applications like Manjaro's package manager (Pamac) and its installer (Calamares):

If a backbone application such as Pamac or Calamares breaks the project lacks motivated people with the skills to fix it. The Pamac dev has been MIA since the end of last year and there is a reported crash which needs fixing, but it is not getting fixed because there is no backup.

The majority of users seemed to be in agreement with the need for change, but not all. User "wntr" said that the manifesto was overly aggressive and "a coup demanding an unconditional surrender. Nobody sane would agree to this." They warned that a failure to reconcile could become "a public and possibly legal battle about who gets to be king of the pile of ash".

Another user, "Kobold", felt that things were fine. "I couldn't be happier with the Distro and I don't think that I would find a good replacement for Manjaro". In a later comment, though, they pointed to a thread from November 2025 that cast some doubt on the health of the project. The topic was about updates to Manjaro's stable repository; why had it not been updated in two months? When Todor Uzunov said that the project was understaffed, Müller's reply raised more questions than it answered: "Basically Mark and I do some work for Manjaro but we don't know for how long".

In context, his comment suggests that things may not be going well for Manjaro as a business, and that perhaps Müller is feeling burned out as well. If so, that would not be surprising; burnout is a real problem for open-source maintainers as well as small-business founders. Trying to be both simultaneously is, no doubt, quite demanding. The comment, though, does little to reassure other contributors or users when it's coming from the project lead who seems to have sole access to much of the project's infrastructure.

Müller's response

His first reply to the manifesto did little to quell concerns. Müller said that he had been sent a draft of the manifesto and was told it might be formally submitted at a later date. Now that it had been posted to the forum, it seemed that the community's intentions to form a nonprofit association were serious. He said that he had no personal objections to the founding of a nonprofit, but he would not be involved in the process.

Any transfers of company assets or infrastructure require close consultation with the company and yet to be established new legal entity, in order to ensure that the interests of both parties are safeguarded as amicably and smoothly as possible. Any actions that could damage the business must be ruled out. To ensure the smooth operation of the company, assets relevant to the company will remain within the company.

Finally, I would like to note that any actions or comments that could damage the business or reputation of myself or the company should be refrained from in order to ensure a mutually agreeable process and avoid legal actions.

Gilg, who at present still seems to be with the company despite having signed on to the manifesto, thanked Müller for the reply and "general agreement" that an association should be founded. He questioned the need for consultation with the company about the transition of assets to an association. The manifesto already provides a "precise list of assets", and he did not see a problem moving them to an association. Gilg asked if Müller saw an issue with it, but he did not reply directly. Nor did he reply to any of the other issues raised in the manifesto or participate in the discussion. However, Müller had been active on the forum in other threads; on March 16, he announced a set of package updates and warned that an age-verification law in Brazil might impact Manjaro users.

An association it is

On March 17, Vandermeiren acknowledged that with the matter out in the open it is difficult for Müller to respond publicly "without pulling a boatload of haters on top of himself", but noted that he has not responded via "the back channels" either. He said that the group behind the manifesto is patient and respectful, but a decision would ultimately have to be made.

Two days later Müller replied that "it seems a bit like the 'Mutiny on the Bounty'" to him, but he was not against having a nonprofit association. He would be open to discussions with a new entity, when it exists: "From my perspective, the new entity must first be established and a transition plan drawn up before anything can actually be set in motion." He also indicated that he had spoken to Gilg, and that Gilg had expressed an interest in taking the lead in founding the nonprofit association.

The ball is in your court. Decide as a community. Go ahead and set the new entity up, then get in touch with me – otherwise, business as usual...

Vandermeiren replied that the response "gives us hope that we can work out this problem very soon". Ten Hoove said that he thought there was an agreement to move forward, and that Gilg would handle the founding of the association. "We'll do as you ask and found the e.V., then work together to facilitate the migration of community components to said e.V." He also thanked the community for its support, "we'll take it from here. And we'll keep you in the loop."

For now, it appears there will be a return to the status quo until an association is founded and negotiations begin. Müller has only indicated a willingness to have discussions, though; he has not provided a guarantee that he is willing to turn over all, or any, of the assets listed in the manifesto. We will keep an eye on any developments as they happen, and hope that the outcome is a good one that serves the Manjaro community well.