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.

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