Today, the team at Manjaro [Official Site] shared some pretty big news for the future of the Linux distribution and it sounds great.
A new company was officially formed as Manjaro GmbH & Co. KG, with Manjaro developers Philip Müller and Bernhard Landauer now being able to commit to the Linux distribution full time with the help of Blue Systems in an advisory role. On top of that, they're working towards teaming up with the non-profit groups CommunityBridge and OpenCollective to handle their donation funding which can then be used towards project-related expenses.
They say this will help them do quite a lot like: protect the independence of Manjaro, provide faster security updates and a more efficient reaction to the needs of users, provide the means to act as a company on a professional level, bring in additional contributors on a paid basis and so on.
Something they made pretty clear, is that the way it's run overall won't be changing. So they will continue to interact with the community, take on suggestions and all that. This is all just formal stuff to get them on secured footing for the future. It will help them to partner with other companies of course, since they're now actually a company themselves. You can see their full post about the news on their forum.
I think it's fantastic when a project made from passion can become something serious like this. It reminds me of how we here at GamingOnLinux started off as nothing more than a little weekend project and now we're here full time.
Can't wait to see what Manjaro can achieve now, good luck to them on it.
Though I'll also give PopOS a try at some point, see how that fares in comparison.
I tried XFCE for a while, but it lacks some very basic functionality like window previews - yeah, you can add compiz to the mix to get that, but those always seem to be at odds with each other and then you end up having various places to make changes in for layouting, etc. instead of just one centralized menu. And the alleged better performance is nothing anyone with a gaming rig would need to begin with.
Still like it better than GNOME, but that's not saying too much, as GNOME... ugh.
So for me it is definitely KDE, at least until XFCE gains some more features I want. Anything except adding Chinese input has been smooth sailing with no problems whatsoever.
Last edited by TheSHEEEP on 9 September 2019 at 9:23 am UTC
Last edited by NOX LinuX on 9 September 2019 at 10:40 am UTC
Also, XFCE or Mate. Neither has ever broken or locked up on me. I want to like KDE, but it always borks on me. And Gnome 3 is just too locked down.
Quoting: NanobangI'd like to go back to the press release, please. Who or what are Blue Systems and how does their advisory role help the devs "commit to the Linux distribution full time?"
Never heard of them before either, but according to Wikipedia, the company has been founded by a computer scientist with too much money. :D (His uncle is very well known in German football ("soccer"), BTW.)
Quoting: CybolicI don't really care about which DE they end up keeping as main as I've been running i3 for quite some time and have recently switched to dwm. As long as no DE is a hard dependency, I'm fine with it.I have Manjaro w/ Gnome running on two desktops and didn't have any installation problems, but I couldn't get it installed on a third desktop. I eventually used the "architect" ISO and was able to get through an installation still using Gnome as the DE. *shrug*
What I'd like to see them focus on is compatibility and stability as the last couple of times I've tried Manjaro, it has either failed to install or locked up on boot. I'm sure it's related to my MSI motherboard not playing nice, so not directly their fault, but plain arch and Antergos (R.I.P.) never failed on me.
Quoting: razing32Curios if they will continue using Arch as a base or fork of it completely and go their own way.The more and more custom packages they use from their own repo, the less I'll want to run Manjaro on some of my computers. But we'll see.
Quoting: EikeQuoting: NanobangI'd like to go back to the press release, please. Who or what are Blue Systems and how does their advisory role help the devs "commit to the Linux distribution full time?"
Never heard of them before either, but according to Wikipedia, the company has been founded by a computer scientist with too much money. :D (His uncle is very well known in German football ("soccer"), BTW.)
Oh, they sound like a pretty groovy outfit, a Community member doing good through financial support. How cool is that?!
Quoting: Whitewolfe80I see your perspective but disagree with your solution. If too many options is the problem for potential Windows converts, then GNU/Linux and even OSS is not for them. I would say point them to a distro that has a more streamlined approach, like Elementary OS or Ubuntu. If that's still too much of a learning curve, get them an Android tablet and tell them it's Linux. (Although, the people you describe sound more like iOS users.)Quoting: 14Emphasis mine:
Quoting: Whitewolfe80In just a handful of posts, you can see why more than one DE needs to be supported. Why would you want fewer options for the masses? I don't understand.Quoting: ShmerlWould be nice if they also focus on KDE as the primary supported DE, and will help speeding up its development.
Personally I would rather xfce became their primary and only de but thats because I like the fact its very memory efficent and i have plenty of ram i just dont like bloat code that comes with a vanilla kde base.
Secondly on your last point no there needs to be fewer options as it does tend to scare off potential windows converts. They go to say manjaro webpage they hit the download button and bam 4 options so imagine you have never used linux before at all and youve been on windows all your life. On one hand you could say oh wow look at the options on the other hand they might well go (and this seems likely as i have worked with a large number of windows users) no i just want an os i dont know what kde is or xfce i just want linux and they are done no second chances.
Why windows works for the majority is there is no choice its windows there is only feature options home prem everybody understands that now if windows started shipping windows aero windows basic windows dx12 windows dx11 then you would see message boards fill with is there just a regular windows i can download. Options are great if you know what they are if you dont its just a confusing mess.
Quoting: pbI used to love KDE, using it all the way through v2 and v3. When they released KDE4, I promptly switched to gnome 2. Then came Gnome 3 so I switched to Mate. With Mate losing momentum in favour of Cinnamon, I switched to XFCE and I never felt the need to switch again (though I have sometimes tried other DEs, including newer versions of KDE). The worst thing about open source is that all the time people break something that is working well, and the best thing about open source is that there are always plenty of alternatives to switch to. :PI've heard it said that one of the best things about Linux is the amount of choice the consumer has.
I've also heard it said that one of the worst things about Linux is the amount of choice the consumer has!
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