> I will go on the record as saying that Manjaro Linux is a bad Linux distribution and a bad place to send this money. They have a history of internal corruption, a record of questionable spending, and a plethora of technical issues and problematic behavior in the FOSS ecosystem. What limited budget there is to go around was wasted in their hands.
Can anyone elaborate on this? I did a little search-foo but couldn't easily find some information regarding this claim...
My experience attempting to contribute to Manjaro (fixes to packages including some without with which packages simply hung when being built interactively, as they depended on stdin being EOF as it is in their CI environment) was met with not just a cold shoulder but active offense and hostility. They don't accept pull requests (in fact, their gitlab configuration doesn't even let one fork), nor is there a mailing list for patches. There simply is no contribution workflow, and this isn't even clearly documented (it's fine to be a "cathedral", but you should be up-front about it).
From my perspective as a Phosh developer, my experience with Manjaro was that they're often packaging unmerged work-in-progress branches with known issues just to ship new features as first (without even mentioning that they ship experimental code or where it comes from), which then causes their users to fill bunch of invalid bug reports upstream.
I rarely like to speak bad of an individual, but the lead developer is an absolute dunce. Maybe the rest of the team is wise and can make up for it, I don't care enough to check. They make braindead decisions(holding packages for weeks for 'stability'), braindead recommendations (cert expired, just set your system clock back duh), and steal code. It was obvious from the code at the time that the developer didn't even really know how to code.
Except, their model is also to ship an AUR helper out of the box, despite the fact that holding back distro packages compared to upstream actively breaks AUR ones that depend on those in the core Arch repo.
If they bothered to do the same thing with the AUR that they're doing with the upstream Arch packages, it'd be one thing. But as is, basically they're claiming that their design keeps the experience "stable" despite the fact that this same decision directly causes other parts of the experience to become unstable.
I believe there was also a problem where some bad coding had every Manjaro box in the world spamming the shit out of the arch repos to the point they were crashing. I'm not sure if the fix was amicable agreement or just an upstream block.
Can anyone elaborate on this? I did a little search-foo but couldn't easily find some information regarding this claim...