A fundamental difference between ‘distro for fun’ and ‘Manjaro’ which comes with a business and tries to sell hardware.
I think the problem was context related, i was hating it also and it was one of the major reason why i lost a good amount (but not all) faith/reputation around Manjaro.
For me it was in a light (unspoken truth) as, where i assumed:
Hey Manjaro is total fine… but we want more money and we don’t tell you the real reason about it. Besides company deals… but for what? To drive a Porsche/BMW around the block?
So no wonder why this lead to bad media, when the real story behind this isn’t fully explained.
True. But you said it yourself…
…so I’ll leave it to the uppers.
Don’t know Cachy and Garuda well, but i tested EOS (cause i want to have some alternatives in case manjaro dies…). Manjato has a lot more customized and inhouse made packages and tools. Like mwhd etc. And the curated rolling requires more testing. More can go wrong and should be debugged. So yes, more customization requires more resources.
Eos is basically arch with a theme and 1-2 tools.
Just look at some eos mirror their repo, it is like a dosen of packages different from arch. That is why they use arch mirrors + own repo.
Here we use dedicated mirrors because hundreds of packages differ a bit. Just cont how many of the packages have a maintainer with manjaro email.
Main site accepts donations in Euros €
manjaro (UK) - Open Collective for UK pounds £
manjaro (US) - Open Collective for US dollars $
Just curious if the money actually go to manjaro.
Open Collective shows all financial transactions of community funds
when you say “if needed more money” does it means manjaro has no money issue
I am just a regular member of this community so I do not know what is discussed by Manjaro Team and staff. But If Manjaro needed more money I would expect them to be asking for donations more frequently
…and we just have a topic for the expired certificate of the website. Which illustrates the point. If only 1-2 persons are taking care of the server+many other things, they may forget. It would be different if 5 people had access. But there are just no 5 persons.
For the donations once more: we here in the forum are the regulars. Probably 50 people, donating regularly. Lets say 20 per person that makes 1000$ a year. With all other donations from people not in the forum, lets hypothetically say 5000 a year are accumulated with donations. How much will a campain bring? Let’s say double, 10 000. BUT what is needed is 100 000. That is why i said it is nice to donate, but user donations cannot be the ultimate solution.
We need companies, which can sponsor whith let’s say 10000 at a time.
I still don’t understand all of this and where this required income comes from? Specially out of nowhere. Boooom 
Manjaro is 14 year’s old right now, how could Manjaro survive 14 year’s with donation’s from 2.000-5.000€ per year but now we need 100.000€ and out of nowhere even 10.000€ per year isn’t enough?
-
Who invested then all this year’s the missing 90.000-95.000€? I don’t get it…
-
What about a middle way, if we have just 3 big staff member’s and just skip the Testing Branch, to evade maintaining cost/time?
-
At the last straw, i would even say… before Manjaro is dead, lets go unstable only branch before i’am forced to switch to another distro.
-
I wish we get a clear statement, if we can safe Manjaro and turn the tide or is Manjaro already the sinking Titanic?
Very good questions. Note that what i wrote above is my personal understanding of the things, i am not a Manjaro Team or Company member. (only forum assistant)
I myself wish a little more transparency and kind of official statement.
I’m afraid you are mistaken. Many of us on the Manjaro Staff did explain over and over what the telemetry was needed for.
But it got drowned out by the alarmists¹, who even went so far as to call Manjaro spyware.
¹ Probably all of them being that privacy-aware kind of dudes who’ve signed up for an account at PornHub, and who then log into that from their Windows laptops. 
It can always be worse. Let me paraphrase: Signed up in Facebook, using the simple sign in with a permanent cookie, with the password stored in Edge, which is syncing with a MS account, on a windows 11 machine, logged in with MS online account.
Whether one needs an Opt-in or if an Opt-out will do isn’t about sentiments or somebody’s ideas. It’s ruled by law and if you collect “personal data” you need an Opt-in. Also “personal data” is a legal term and not anyone’s laymen notion of it. A simple randomly generated installation id send to your server is already personal data under legal terms. If you think this is nonsense check with the lawyer of your choice.
Anyway i don’t understand this MDD thingy. I mean i understand that you’ll need to show what reach your distro has (so how relevant it is) but are you really confident you could simply produce these numbers yourself? Just imagine some TV network would come up and say we have a market share of 120% according to our own data collection - doesn’t sound like a good one, does it? Normally such data collection is done by a third party in a neutral and reliable way.
The only “neutral” way — which happens to be how GNU/Linux market share is determined every year or so — is through browser identification strings matched to public IP addresses. They do not take into account multiple machines behind a NAT, nor can they identify bare-metal installations versus virtual machines, and they are mostly distribution-agnostic.
mdd is a lot more precise in its accounting, but by definition, the tool therefore has to be installed in the operating system, which means that it must be developed — or at the very least, supported — by the distribution makers themselves.
Those are details. Of course it should be privacy compliant at least in the EU, and it can be a opt-in but with a popup with a nice explanation what is collected and why is important, and there is absolute no problem to give the server-side database some other 3rd party.
And MDD by the way had the concept of a development support tool, to have some idea for the mostly used hardware and DEs so that more efforts can be put there. And for that a lot of people will volunteer.
Counting heads is a secondary function which will come handy for finding partnerships and investors.
And the data is not that much and personally identifiable at all (except the uuid). It is not like sending samples of your voice or your searches or all you type…which some big companies do.
My MDD
[teo@teo-lenovo-v15 ~]$ mdd --force-telemetry
Welcome to MDD - The Manjaro Data Donor
Preparing data submission...
------------------------------------------
Sending the following data
------------------------------------------
{
"meta": {
"version": 1,
"timestamp": "2025-11-26T16:48:51.520398+00:00",
"device_id": "XXXXXXXXXXXXX",
"distro_id": "manjaro",
"release": "25.0.10",
"variant_id": null,
"opt_in": true,
"inxi": true
},
"package": {
"last_update": "2025-11-26T16:54:37+01:00",
"branch": "stable",
"pacman_mirrors": {
"total": 4,
"ok": 4,
"country_config": "Germany"
},
"pkgs": 2502,
"foreign_pkgs": 3,
"pkgs_update_pending": 0,
"flatpaks": 19
},
"system": {
"kernel": "6.12.48-1-MANJARO",
"form_factor": "laptop",
"install_date": "2023-06-02T22:13:52+00:00",
"product_name": "82QY",
"product_family": "V15 G2 IJL",
"sys_vendor": "LENOVO",
"board_name": "LNVNB161216"
},
"boot": {
"uefi": true,
"uptime_seconds": 8860
},
"cpu": {
"arch": "x86_64",
"model": "Intel Pentium Silver N6000",
"cores": 4,
"threads": 4
},
"memory": {
"ram_gb": 7.568233489990234,
"swap_gb": 11.230464935302734
},
"graphics": {
"comp": "xfwm4",
"dri": "iris",
"gpus": [
{
"vendor": "Lenovo",
"model": "Intel JasperLake [UHD Graphics]",
"driver": "i915"
}
],
"outputs": [
{
"model": "BOE Display 0x08d5",
"res": "1920x1080",
"refresh": 60.0,
"dpi": 142.0,
"size": "344x194",
"mapped": "eDP-1"
}
]
},
"audio": {
"servers": [
{
"name": "PipeWire",
"active": true
}
]
},
"disk": {
"disks": [
{
"size_gb": 238.47493743896484,
"root": {
"size_gb": 147.392578125,
"fstype": "ext4",
"crypt": false
},
"home": null
}
],
"windows": true
},
"locale": {
"region": "en_US.UTF-8",
"language": "en",
"timezone": "Europe/Berlin"
},
"desktop": {
"cli": "/bin/bash",
"gui": "Xfce",
"dm": "LightDM",
"wm": "xfwm4",
"display": "x11",
"display_with": null
}
}
------------------------------------------
Succesful sent at 2025-11-26 17:48:58
I would like to come back to the (to my) main question at the moment:
- is Manjaro in danger because of missing money?
All the rest of the questions here discussed are right, relevant, fair, good.
But for me, the main question is:
- do we need to be in fear regarding our Manjaro distro because of lack of money in the background?
@philm ,
could you please clarify this in a clear understandable way, without any politics, without marketing, without whatever? Just to give us an understanding what the (financial and in general) situation is. Not for the GmbH. This is “your” part, but there is a) the GmbH and b) the project.
I would be interested in the future of the project “manjaro” and the related relationship towards financials.
For me, the rest of the … mdd or whatever … discussions is only there cause of the financials … so let’s clarify this main topic first …
You may google for AGOF. They way it works is you get a library (no not open source) to include into your app or web page. This is for apps or web pages that finance themselves via ads (in the German market). I don’t think it would make any sense for Linux distros, though. Anyway the point is, you don’t produce the numbers yourself. I understand the wish to make money, but realistically you don’t make this money with everyday users of a distro. Canonical had to learn this, and Suse and Redhat learned it long before when they moved from boxed editions to enterprise editions.
Moreover, i think one shouldn’t disregard donations in any way. I think in the US the public broadcasting system is essentially financed via fundraising. (Just imagine the BBC had to do so.)
I think we need to clearly point out something here, which is that the Manjaro distribution and the Manjaro GmbH are two completely separate entities. The former is a community-driven project, and the latter is a commercial business hosted in Germany.
The member donations go towards the community-driven development of Manjaro. The GmbH on the other hand relies on the sales of hardware and partnership deals with (proprietary) third-party software vendors.
It is therefore the GmbH which relies on the community-developed project, and not the other way around. It’s important to realize this.
All of the US mainstream media — printed, served up on the web, or televised — are owned by the same five megacorporations, all of which have a political affiliation, although some of them profile their political vantages more openly than others.
Up until a few years ago it was all in the hands of six megacorporations, but one of them recently got consumed by one of the other big sharks in the puddle.
@Aragorn , thanks for this. Makes sense and even if I knew - to read this again makes it easier to understand.
It anyhow seems to be not as easy as described by you, as some of the irritations discussed in this thread were related to the financial situation (of the GmbH? , or the project? … not sure … here we are)
If the project manjaro would not rely on the GmbH, than the difficulties regarding lack of developers / lack of money to pay developers would be an issue of the GmbH only … but this is - at least as it seems to be - not the case.
Missing money in the GmbH leads to issues in the project. So there IS a close binding between both.
And - as Phil is dancing on both parties as the leader - fair enough btw - this again leads to a very close interdependency between both.
In my naive view you can not separate both from each other completely…
This is - at least for me - how it looks like. Maybe it is wrong … but this is how it seems to be.
Edit: PS: I do not want to step on someone’s toes at all … If I do with my questions, please give me a clear shout … I am more then happy with our manjaro and the community aso.
Forgive me if I have missed that, but I have not seen any statement directly reflecting this.
Could you give me a pointer as to why you believe that to be the case, and thus, to what I must have missed? 
Well, I do not know whether the GmbH is missing any money — again, I have not seen any mention of this.
On the other hand, there is of course the issue that people who were working on the community-developed Manjaro distribution earlier also need to be able to put food on the table. As such, many of them have in the meantime accepted an employment in the private sector, with very little spare time left to dedicate to the further development of Manjaro.
So in a way, there is a correlation between the community-driven Manjaro distribution and the Manjaro GmbH, yes. But it’s not such a direct dependency-driven relationship.
As far as I know — but I don’t have any recent numbers — the community funds resulting from donations aren’t in too bad a shape yet. But if we want to attract more developers, and if these developers then expect to be directly reimbursed by the Manjaro community itself, then we would indeed be needing many more donations.
ok - as I said - just my impression that might indeed be wrong.