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Manjaro has long been one of the more popular Arch-based Linux distributions, known for making Arch Linux more accessible to everyday users. But it has been losing ground for years, both in terms of user trust and active contributors, and the complaints about its direction have only gotten louder.

Now, things have hit a breaking point, with calls for a fork if the current leadership does not budge.

A Manjaro team member going by the handle "Aragorn" has published the "Manjaro 2.0 Manifesto" on the official Manjaro forum. The post lays out a detailed restructuring plan for the project that has been signed by 19 team members, including developers, community managers, moderators, and the company's technical lead.

The manifesto opens by stating that the Manjaro Project has been declining over the past decade, losing trust and contributors while repeating the same mistakes without ever addressing them.

One example cited is the repeated failure to keep TLS certificates current, something volunteers had reportedly already built tooling to fix, only to be ignored.

From there, it goes after the core issue directly. Aragorn writes that Philip Müller (the project lead) has been running Manjaro as his own personal venture rather than a community effort, keeping a tight hold on access to both the codebase and the infrastructure.

Aragorn goes on to say that:

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 money situation makes it worse. The manifesto says the company, Manjaro GmbH & Co KG, has not been funneling any of its funds back into the project and has not pursued outside funding either.

What the team wants is a clean separation, where the Manjaro Project is spun off from Manjaro GmbH & Co. KG and restructured as a registered nonprofit association under German law (e.V.).