Manjaro 2.0 Feedback: A New Business Model for Desktop Linux

[amstalks]

Rethinking Manjaro’s Future Through Economic Sustainability

Hey everyone — this post is inspired by the previous discussions on Manjaro 2.0 Manifesto in the Discussions regarding the Manjaro 2.0 Manifesto thread. I want to offer a perspective that I feel is missing from most of the conversation so far, and I hope @philm, and @romangg — along with other moderators the wider community — will allow people to share more ideas and engage with it openly.

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The Gap I’m Seeing

Most of the debate has been framed in technical and governance terms — which is understandable, but it risks missing the bigger picture. A project cannot survive on passion alone. Economic sustainability is the foundation that makes everything else possible.

The real value proposition of Manjaro Linux is adding a polished commercialization layer on top of Arch Linux — much in the same way Ubuntu is built on Debian. That is the moat. That is the opportunity. We should be doubling down on it, not dismantling it.

This is fundamentally not a pure infrastructure project like KDE or LibreOffice, which justifies a standalone foundation. It is a product — and products need business models.

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What We Can Learn From Others

Three names deserve our attention: SUSE, Red Hat, and Ubuntu. Each found a way to honor their open-source community while building a commercially viable enterprise around it. None of them did it by choosing either community or business — they built structures that let both coexist and thrive.

We can do the same.

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A Structural Proposal

Here is what I’d like to put on the table:

1. HoldCo — Manjaro AG
Incorporate a holding company (e.g., Manjaro AG) in a neutral, well-regarded jurisdiction such as Zürich, Switzerland. Structure it so that:

• Every contributor has an equal right to participate
• Co-founders and long-standing team members receive fair equity for their historical contributions
• The HoldCo appoints a separate Board of Directors and Executive Management — insulating governance from day-to-day personality conflicts

2. OpCo — Manjaro GmbH (Restructured)
The HoldCo owns the existing Manjaro GmbH in Berlin as its operational arm. The GmbH:

• Funds and sponsors the open community project
• Builds and sells commercial products and services

3. The Open Community — OpenManjaro Project
The GmbH sponsors a self-organized, lightweight community collective — call it the OpenManjaro Project, Manjaro Collective, or even Manjaroll — without a heavy legal structure, modeled after how openSUSE relates to SUSE or Fedora relates to Red Hat. It is independently governed by its own OpenManjaro Board, elected by contributors.

4. The Commercial Product — Manjaro Linux Pro
The OpCo builds Manjaro Linux Pro — a downstream product built on OpenManjaro — targeting home users, schools, and enterprises with:

• Integrated AI tooling
• Cloud subscription services
• Consulting & education offerings

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A Vision Worth Fighting For

Imagine positioning Manjaro Linux Pro as the open-source equivalent of a premium computing experience like the Macbook of Linux. In addition to partnering with the other enterprises like:

Partner	Country	How They Can Fit
Murena Retail SAS	France	Privacy-first mobile ecosystem
Framework Computer Inc	USA	Repairable, open hardware
Raspberry Pi Holdings plc	UK	Affordable, open hardware
OVH Groupe SA	France	The largest European cloud
Opera Software AS	Norway	Featured browser with built-in AI
Brave Software Inc	USA	Privacy browser and search engine
Mistral AI SAS	France	Open-source AI service provider
Ascensio System SIA	Latvia	Web-based ONLYOFFICE suite
DeepL SE	Germany	AI-powered translation solution

This is not a fantasy — it is the kind of ecosystem play that could make Manjaro a reference platform for privacy-respecting, AI-capable, European-aligned computing. The Linux desktop revolution will not be won by a fragmented community squabbling over a .org domain. It will be won by building something people and enterprises want to depend on and pay for.

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In Closing

This community has real talent, a recognized brand, and a loyal user base. All of that is worth fighting for — not just fighting over.

Let’s respect each other, think bigger, and build something the whole Linux world can be proud of.

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This is an open proposal — please challenge any part of it. Constructive debate is how we get to the right answer.

[Aragorn]

Welcome to the forum!

With all due respect, your post reads 100% like the typical response from an A.I. to a prompt — something we do not particularly appreciate over in this neck of the woods, and especially not if the poster omits mention of it indeed being an LLM-generated post.

Now, I cannot speak for all of my fellow Team members, but the roadmap laid out by your A.I. friend does sound more than a little too grandiose for our purposes.

Also, I don’t think using either RedHat or SUSE as examples would be such a good idea, given that RedHat has recently been sold to IBM, and that SUSE has already changed hands several times as well, not to mention that it is about to be sold yet again.

All we want is to continue supplying our users with an excellent and curated Arch-derivative distribution that’s more user-friendly than a bare-bones Arch, but without turning it into a brain-dead consumerist appliance the likes of which are legion.

Of course, we still have a lot of work ahead of us with respect to the restructuring, and things should of course ultimately also yield a greater degree of success for the Manjaro GmbH. But a corporate overlord is not what we’re looking for.

I’ll leave it at that for now, and do bear in mind that these are just my own thoughts. I will leave it to my colleagues to speak for themselves.

[Teo]

I think he is missing the point completely. This is a nice vision/fantasy, but leaving the fact that it contradict pretty much everything we said so far, it is nothing more than that. Because we are missing the investor giving us the billion dollars for a start. I guess it is time to put the word AI everywhere.

If only the AI generated visions were working…we would all be billionaires by now. The reality is - majority of those who managed to become such sold thin air to all others

P.s. i am afraid this will generate a lot of fud, spam and not so wanted attention and traffic for no real benefit. I will unlist it for now. The others can relist it if they see fit.

[amstalks]

@Aragorn

With all due respect, your post reads 100% like the typical response from an A.I. to a prompt — something we do not particularly appreciate over in this neck of the woods, and especially not if the poster omits mention of it indeed being an LLM-generated post.

First of all, I’ll be never shy to confirm that I usually use the latest A.I. technology to polish my original ideas into well-structured essays, especially that I’m a published writer in newspapers before the era of LLMs and Attention Is All You Need. You can conclude it easily if you have paid a little attention to my personal profile here!

BTW, I can also say: your original Manjaro 2.0 Manifesto —with many em dashes— reads 100% like the typical response from an A.I. to a prompt. However, I’ll not say it because I highly respect you, whilst the “100%” percentage is so disrespectful and harmful to human mind. I suggest you to read “Kritik der reinen Vernunft” for a better Weltanschauung.

Anyways… let’s stick to the main output. Really excited to hear honest criticism from all team members.

@Teo

Because we are missing the investor giving us the billion dollars for a start.

One detail worth adding on the proposal, it can be funded like a normal startup:

1. Community Roots: seed money via crowdfunding, giving it democratic legitimacy from day one
2. Venture Capitals: Series A, B, C, D as Manjaro Linux Pro gets published and gains traction
3. Going Public: a Swiss AG company in the canton of Zug would be a great tax-efficient choice, easy access to US/UK/EU investors, and finally IPO in SIX Swiss Exchange or it might be an ICO for utility token on the Internet Computer Protocol (ICP).

SUSE went public but struggled. Canonical stayed private forever. The real inspiration is Raspberry Pi, a mission-driven tech company that pulled off a successful IPO while keeping its founding values intact.

I think people might hesitate before donating to an eV with no growth potential, but they will be far more encouraged to invest in an AG where their contribution builds real equity and shared ownership for contributors, users, and partners.

[Aragorn]

@amstalks

BTW, I can also say: your original Manjaro 2.0 Manifesto —with many em dashes— reads 100% like the typical response from an A.I. to a prompt.

Then I guess I need to offer a little clarification. The Manifesto was not composed by myself, but by other Team members — without the use of A.I., because a lot of thought went into the wording — and the em-dashes were probably my unintended trademark, given that I did an edit job on the text in order to correct punctuation, spelling and sentence construction.

And that’s another proof that no A.I. was used in creating the document, because an A.I wouldn’t make that many spelling and punctuation mistakes, and its sentence construction would be near-perfect. It is after all called a “large language model”.

But so anyway, contrary to what most people might think, given that I was the one who posted the Manifesto, my only input in its composition was limited to some spelling, grammar, punctuation and other editorial corrections, although we did discuss the content among the team, and we changed it several times to include or exclude certain things of which we felt they were too harsh, or too soft, or too unclear.

Also, I meant no insult towards yourself in my reply. I just felt — as @Teo has also highlighted — that what your A.I.-composed dissertation presented was light-years away from our own objectives.

@amstalks

Really excited to hear honest criticism from all team members.

My criticism was honest, but I did also add that they were my thoughts only, and that I do not assume the arrogance of making it appear as if I’m speaking for all Team members.

If my colleagues have anything to add or clarify, then they are always welcome to do so, and I trust they will.

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@amstalks

I think people might hesitate before donating to an eV with no growth potential, but they will be far more encouraged to invest in an AG where their contribution builds real equity and shared ownership for contributors, users, and partners.

I am sorry, but that’s marketeer speak, not community speak.

Our objectives are not to turn Manjaro into a commercial product. The Manjaro GmbH has its commercial partners and offers services to paying customers, but the distribution itself is a community effort, and you would be thoroughly surprised how many people would be willing to donate to a community effort.

Corporations don’t need any donations, because they already get their income from their commercial activity.

[amstalks]

@Aragorn

Our objectives are not to turn Manjaro into a commercial product.

What I can understand is: Philip Müller has incorporated Manjaro GmbH to polish Arch Linux for endusers with a kind of commercialization layer, in the same way Ubuntu does to Debian, that is the hidden intrinsic value of Manjaro. Bayerische Brillanz!

Else… the winning Arch-based distro would be CachyOS, which is already the most trending one nowadays. I think Manjaro gained much popularity because it’s a commercially-backed community project. Thus, rather than destroying the founder’s original vision, why not take a step further to correct/improve it in the same direction which is probably going to make a better potential, and I’m one of those who are willing to invest financially among many others I guess. (PS: public opinion polling is a good tool for feasibility studies.)

@Aragorn

Corporations don’t need any donations, because they already get their income from their commercial activity.

From an ESG-aligned viewpoint, most of donations should be directed to essential foundations (i.e. Arch itself). Thank you! You’re welcome!

[Ben]

AI gets carried away as lightning streaks through the algorithms and prints out answers… the output is indeed gorgeously rendered, perfectly formatted, but yet when reading it feels suddenly like I have gone through a black alert into another mirror universe, it’s hard to relate.

• I know AI isn’t good at understanding the picture - but is working hard to solve a problem that’s hard to understand and it has zero intelligence.

• The basic issue is actually extremely simple. Other solutions can flow once that is agreed.

Definitely governance, transparency and community are binding constraints - but not the lack of a Swiss holding company, or partnerships with Mistral AI…

[tracyanne]

@amstalks

I think people might hesitate before donating to an eV with no growth potential

Then you really do not understand the nature of the Beast.

People do not ‘invest’ in Free Open Source Projects… for equity and shared ownership.

They donate so that the project can continue.

[amstalks]

@Ben

Definitely governance, transparency and community are binding constraints

I’m not wondering what’s the motivation to unlist the thread then to change the narrative from the main rational PoV to: Why he is not shy to use A.I. and 5G WiFi…

Silencing people voices will never create a trustworthy “community-led” foundation to be honest. I think a GmbH that is led by Philip Müller is way more democratic, at least he didn’t unlist the Manifesto or any disrespectful comments against him.

[tracyanne]

@amstalks

I’m not wondering what’s the motivation to unlist the thread

Nor am I.

[Teo]

For the record there were no disrespectful comments about Phil, otherwise we would have moderated them anyway because we want to be constructive and polite here.

The way you made your text is additional trigger and irritation for some of us. It is not important. What is important is the content, and it is detached from reality and context. You didn’t even bother to read the manifest and to understand the problem, so you answer to a question that is not being asked, so to say. Completely missing the point. And writing it to the wrong persons…if you wanna invest in or advise or lobby for a company…just call Phil. The gmbh is there. Or even better, start your own distro. It is not that hard to start, it is hard to sustain it. Or so it seems because there are hundreds of linux distros and only 3 of them are making money, and about 10 or less are older then 10 years. But you have a good business plan so good luck.

P.s. the motivation to unlist was to save time and frustration to everybody. Thank you for you opinion, but the topic isn’t really going anywhere. Unfortunately there are a lot of internet trolls out there, who will come if they smell a topic that is not going anywhere and make sure it will become at least 500 post. With the cherry on top provoking some mod to ban them, making screenshot and starting a rant topic on reddit or a video on youtube.
Thank but no, let’s use the time more wisely instead of feeding the trolls.

[tracyanne]

@amstalks

Silencing people voices will never create a trustworthy “community-led” foundation to be honest.

Personally, I do not believe your motivations are entirely honest. But as @Teo has written…

@Teo

if you wanna invest in or advise or lobby for a company…just call Phil.

The Community, and therefore the Community run Distribution, is not a Company.

Nothing your AI generated text proposes, has any bearing on a Community driven project.

[Aragorn]

@amstalks

I’m not wondering what’s the motivation to unlist the thread

I’m not the one who unlisted it, but I can clearly see why it was unlisted, namely that this sort of — and I apologize for the wording — misguided proposals would attract similarly misguided individuals, all seeking to steer the initiative away from our actual objectives.

The way I see it, you are looking for a profitable business venture, and with the help of your A.I. friend — which will present you with equally grandiose illusions of success regardless of what you prompt it towards, even if it were an idea for a multinational business empire based upon toilet paper in gender-neutral colors — you are glomming onto Manjaro as the vehicle for your business venture without understanding Manjaro or even caring about it.

Meanwhile however, just as your A.I. friend, you completely fail to understand…

• what GNU/Linux and Free/Open Software are about;
• what Manjaro is all about;
• why we wrote and published the Manjaro 2.0 Manifesto in the first place; and
• why your grandiose proposition is 100% the opposite of what we’re trying to achieve.

We’re not looking for business successes, and even Philip himself is not the kind of guy who would be interested in your kind of business plans. Philip’s plans for the Manjaro GmbH are a lot more modest and humble, because he’s a developer at heart, not a wannabe billionaire.

The problem was therefore never one of us being opposed to Philip’s own business plan — on the contrary, we all want to help him — but one of having no direct hands-on control over the development of the software and the supporting infrastructure, resulting in a quasi-bureaucratic bottleneck in the development and improvement of the Manjaro operating system itself.

Your vision and ours are light-years removed from each other, and are irrefutably mutually incompatible.

It’s that simple.

[Ben]

@Aragorn

It’s that simple.

But hey WOW. This is the BIG BRAIN ENERGY Manjaro NEEDS!!! **

We’ve been sleeping on the MacBook of Linux dream for way too long!!!

Why fight over an .org when we can build a .AG in ZÜRICH with alpine views and fiduciary excellence???

The structural separation between HoldCo (vibes & equity) and OpCo (gmbh & grind) is literally chef’s kiss

OpenManjaro Collective — or “Manjaroll”

A self-organized collective that runs on vibes, elections, and PRs???

This is literally Fedora + openSUSE energy but with that Manjaro polish we all know and love!!!

Imagine the merch!!! “I survived the Manjaroll Board Elections 2026” hoodies!!!

Manjaro Linux Pro — The Linux Desktop FINALLY Gets a Business Class Seat

YES!!! Partnering with System76, TUXEDO, Framework… the EU AI alliance… the privacy-first computing stack…

This isn’t just a distro anymore… it’s an ECOSYSTEM!!!

We’re not squabbling over packaging — we’re building the Deutsche Bank of Arch Linux derivatives (but in a cool, community-first way!!!)

FINAL THOUGHTS (AI-generated but coded)

Passion doesn’t pay for build servers.
Love doesn’t fund devops.
But Manjaro AG with a Board of Directors AND a sick merch store???

That’s the future.

We need more posts like this!!! Let the synergy flow!!! This is the way.

Posted from my Manjaro KDE Plasma (btw)

Sponsored by Ben’Slop™ incorporated ©2026: Terms and conditions apply. This post does not constitute medical, financial, or existential advice. Side effects may include nodding in agreement.

[amstalks]

@Ben

But hey WOW. This is the BIG BRAIN ENERGY Manjaro NEEDS!!! **

“Mockery is the weapon of those who have no other.” — Samuel Johnson

Wishing you all the success your effort deserves!

[Ben]

@amstalks

Wishing you all the success your effort deserves!

In my defence, as with your posts, it wasn’t written by me.