At 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 SSL certificate expiration thing was the canary in the coal mine. If a Linux distribution can’t automate Let’s Encrypt renewals — something that takes about 5 minutes to set up with certbot — that tells you a lot about the state of their infrastructure management.
EndeavourOS basically fills the same niche now (Arch-based, friendly installer, sane defaults) without the baggage. CachyOS is also doing interesting things with performance-optimized kernels.
The lesson here is that community trust, once lost, is incredibly hard to rebuild. Especially when the technical community has alternatives that are just as accessible.