Today i learned that manjaro has, in parts, german roots and is maintained by a german company. For that i, as a german myself, want to strongly apologize in the name of the german people!!
Today i learned that manjaro has, in parts, german roots and is maintained by a german company. For that i, as a german myself, want to strongly apologize in the name of the german people!!
I like Manjaro! What’s wrong with it?
They have had their fair share of (sometimes easily avoidable) fuck-ups.
Stuff like:
Especially the SSL cert hurts. They cannot auto-renew their websites SSL cert (and didn’t seem to learn from their first mistake) and they want to maintain a linux distro?
The “internal struggle” was actually related to the rest and (hopefully) sorted out the other issues.
The tl;dr is that Manjaro was setup as a company with one owner who often didn’t do what he was supposed to and no one else had access to do it. This caused issues like the SSL stuff but also other things. Obviously this made quite some volunteers leave over time, but as the distro itself is actually quite nice also a bunch didn’t want to give up that easily. Those pretty much gave that one person the choice to transfer the distro to a new to-be-made non-profit (leaving only the commercial activities in the company) or they would leave (and likely fork it or something). He agreed and they’re now in the legal process of setting up the non-profit, where important things will not be in the hands of a single person.
So all with all it was a bit messy, but it seems they got it sorted out now. That should also prevent issues like they’ve seen in the past. So with that I wouldn’t recommend against the distro. I still have it on some secundairy systems, where my main one (I need to say this naturally) got switched during the drama to run Arch (btw).
You can read more here: https://forum.manjaro.org/t/manjaro-2-0-manifesto/186171
When did all this unfold? Didn’t the cert expire again, like, yesterday? When will they switch leadership?
I don’t work for Manjaro, so I don’t know more than the public info either. But I guess after all the legal stuff is settled? Last update they where in the final stages of setting up the non-profit. They need to finish that to be able to transfer ownership I’d suppose.
Sort of. He said he was open to the general idea but raised a bunch of provisions and then ghosted everybody. I don’t think there’s been any further communication for the last few months.
If you check the link I posted (which is the non-discussion thread that explained the situation) it has the updates. Most come from dennis1248. On Matrix he also confirmed those are the latest updates, altrough that was a while back already. I don’t check that Matrix chat that often. So while the owner (Phil) hasn’t replied publicly since, there are updates from the people who started the manifest about what’s happening behind the scenes since.
Last update I know of was the one late June, mentioning nearly finishing all the legal paperwork for setting up the non-profit entity (where they updated us before to take longer than expected due to the complexity of writing legal stuff taking longer than expected).
That’s good to know
Fair enough. I can play HalfLife Alyx on it, and that makes me happy.
What hardware and software do you use for this? I’ve been trying on and off for maybe a year trying to get an HP Reverb G2 working with envision/monado. My most recent struggles were with lining up build dependencies, like boost, cnmatrix, etc., which I chalked up to version incompatiblies between Manjaro/AUR.
I have a Lenovo Legion 7 laptop with an 2070 super Max Q. I play with a Quest 2 over Steam Play. It’s amazing.
Why don’t you just use SteamVR?
Quest 2 is a solid headset, but imo you should be running it through a pihole to block Facebook telemetry, that thing sends a truly Astonishing amount of data to Facebook.
Fair enough
I can’t remember exactly what they were, but I had issues with getting the headset to work with only SteamVR. I’ll have to give it another go when I get time. It seems maybe standalone headsets like the Quest lineup fare much better than PCVR headsets on Linux. https://wiki.vronlinux.org/docs/hardware/
Interesting. They’ve made big headway with SteamVR with the Frame coming out.
Their SSL certs keep expiring and they have a weird package release schedule on a ~2wk delay from base Arch, which causes half of the AUR (or any custom pacman repos) to break in unpredictable ways due to out-of-sync packages.
Another Manjaro user, there are dozens of us!
Unite!
Outside of what Hamsda said (to which I’ve added some context), the thing with Manjaro is also that it’s target is easy usage which attracts beginners. Now that isn’t bad per se (it was my first distro too, and I still run it on some machines. I’m not a hater) but it does become a thing when those people go to Arch-related spaces (like the Arch forum or the AUR comment section) asking Arch-people for help.
For one, Manjaro isn’t Arch. It may be based on it, but it also has it’s differences. It’s better to ask on the Manjaro forums. Why some Manjaro users go bother the Arch forums I never understood. The Manjaro forum is very helpful, quick to react, and more appropiate. No reason to divert really…
And secondary, Arch is a distro aimed at more advanced users and has a “know the basics, read the documentation, understand it, and try stuff yourself. And if you thén still don’t know you can ask” expectation. Since Manjaro attracts beginners, the questions they ask are often not only about a different distro, but on the level Arch expects you to be able to figure it out yourself making it rather a nuicance (after all, they’re asking beginner questions in a space for advanced users). Manjaro users doing that somewhat regularily gave it a bad reputation.
I’ve always felt that Manjaro holds an untenable position on the Arch derivative spectrum. It’s a weird mix of difficult (inherited from Arch) and fragile setup out of the box.
The best way to use it is to accept all the decisions that were put into that setup and not tinker with it… but that runs counter to everything that Arch stands for. So it keeps attracting exactly the wrong kind of user, who will tinker and get frustrated, and eventually break it, and then go around telling everybody that it sucks.
IMO it works well for two types of users:
It’s a rather specific niche.
It also works well for the “new to Linux but interested in it and tech-saffy enough to learn quickly” people. For those it’s an easier and fuller start-up than an install with the archinstall script that they can use right away while learning along the way. It makes it a good beginner distro for die-hard nerds, but I wouldn’t recommend it for those not interested or tech-saffy enough to handle such an approach.
But yeah, I agree the main users are those who like the Archiness but want something that “just works” most of the time. Not necesarrily because they can’t maintain it otherwise, but because they don’t want too. The first group I mentioned can transfer into this one over time, while at other times switching to Arch itself or more thinker-friendly Archbased distros.
That group is relatively big however, big enough to create some market at least. It’s why I still run it on many secundairy devices, less maintaining but keeps working. At the same time I know some who run it on their production machines for that, while thinkinger with Arch on secundary devices. Once they got a setup they like enough and figured it’s exact requirements, they alter Manjaro to it.
I guess something like SteamOS is better for Archi but for nontech-savvy people. I can give it to my niece and she can use it, but due to it being immutable (unless purposely turning that off) and getting updates from Valve she won’t break it easily. That is; OS-wise. While actually running the games tends to “just work” most of the time, the times it doesn’t are too often and the thinkering then needed too complex to make it suitable for that group of people.
good point
me neither
highlight the last time was a manjaro user asking me in the aur to help him with his manjaro issues on the package. fucking leechers