As someone who used Manjaro for ~4 years, Manjaro used to be a perfect system. I never borked my system in all those time. It had strong defaults and it taught me well that I am using Arch for the last 3ish years without issues. I will be grateful for that I guess.
While I don't know the technical side of things now, Manjaro was great as a product. It was far more stable than Ubuntu which was unstable and had older packages. Manjaro's community was awesome and they used to listen to the community as well. The forum was one of a kind. I learned a lot and made good online buds there.
Things started to change when they jumped into business and wanted to make money. They started becoming ignorant of requests and complaints from community. They also stopped doing the original way of things with respect to the distro. That is, they started violating the 2 weeks thing with packages. They sometimes for selective packages went directly to upstream devs ignoring the arch repos. KDE and Systemd are examples IIRC. This means the advantages of tested arch packages arriving to your system 2 weeks after was not there anymore. This borked a lot of systems and brought new issues issues as well. Their excuse was they wanted latest packages. But KDE was connected from a git repo if I remember it correctly. I am not sure if that was stable releases but from development branch of KDE (please verify this specific part, I might be wrong about this as I don't remember well. I don't want to be spreading fake news). Also, systemd. This meant directly going to upstream dev packaging without arch's testing or whatsoever. I remember increased borks after this started happening.
Then just like the blog post mentioned, Jonathon who was handling community and loved by the whole community was thrown out of the team because of the money problem. He was the glue between community and devs. He always tried to help the users. And once that happened, I started became very skeptical.
To make things worse, they had an issue with forums and it went offline. Instead of recovering from backup, they created a new forum where we all had to re-register. The old forum had all the conversations about the money issue which ended up with Jonathon being kicked out. And all the old users from beginning who have been there from the beginning. Their excuse was they wanted to start fresh. They did bring the old forum back in a different URL and put it in read only mode. But I always found it the most effective tactic to kill things slowly. Not bringing back the old one would be extremely criticized. They lost a huge chunk of old users who were frustrated for varied reasons then. They mostly left frustrated. And most new users wouldn't know or ever come across the old conversations. Most old users didn't join the new forum. And all the conversations was smartly hidden away this way. They can wash their hands off by saying - hey! It's available to read. We are not hiding anything. The worst was that they made the new forum bloody strict. This meant no more questioning the team. That was my tipping point. I installed arch and been happy. I saw Jonathon in Arch. Not sure whether he is working with Arch team.
They messed up a perfect system. They could just continue with the old way. Manjaro could've helped arch a lot. But they don't. They did revolutionise things like Manjaro Hardware Detection (MHWD) which automatically installs all your drivers including the graphics card in single click. You could install multiple kernel versions and switch between kernels. This was all nice at the time. But they borked it for some cash. Glad I moved on. Looks like they messed it up technically as well in the last 3+ years.
My finger wasn't very on the pulse of the Manjaro community, but my experience with the OS and with the (new) forum didn't seem diminished after the "companyfication".
I, too, have switched to Arch, 95% because I felt ready to (as someone else wrote, "Manjaro was my bridge to Arch across the chasm from Ubuntu") and wanted to try it, 5% because I'd rather trust a mysterious cabal of devs than a company with a bottom line that can get bought out or whatever.
I don't have trouble believing you though; they say $$$ is the root of all evil for a reason.
While I don't know the technical side of things now, Manjaro was great as a product. It was far more stable than Ubuntu which was unstable and had older packages. Manjaro's community was awesome and they used to listen to the community as well. The forum was one of a kind. I learned a lot and made good online buds there.
Things started to change when they jumped into business and wanted to make money. They started becoming ignorant of requests and complaints from community. They also stopped doing the original way of things with respect to the distro. That is, they started violating the 2 weeks thing with packages. They sometimes for selective packages went directly to upstream devs ignoring the arch repos. KDE and Systemd are examples IIRC. This means the advantages of tested arch packages arriving to your system 2 weeks after was not there anymore. This borked a lot of systems and brought new issues issues as well. Their excuse was they wanted latest packages. But KDE was connected from a git repo if I remember it correctly. I am not sure if that was stable releases but from development branch of KDE (please verify this specific part, I might be wrong about this as I don't remember well. I don't want to be spreading fake news). Also, systemd. This meant directly going to upstream dev packaging without arch's testing or whatsoever. I remember increased borks after this started happening.
Then just like the blog post mentioned, Jonathon who was handling community and loved by the whole community was thrown out of the team because of the money problem. He was the glue between community and devs. He always tried to help the users. And once that happened, I started became very skeptical.
To make things worse, they had an issue with forums and it went offline. Instead of recovering from backup, they created a new forum where we all had to re-register. The old forum had all the conversations about the money issue which ended up with Jonathon being kicked out. And all the old users from beginning who have been there from the beginning. Their excuse was they wanted to start fresh. They did bring the old forum back in a different URL and put it in read only mode. But I always found it the most effective tactic to kill things slowly. Not bringing back the old one would be extremely criticized. They lost a huge chunk of old users who were frustrated for varied reasons then. They mostly left frustrated. And most new users wouldn't know or ever come across the old conversations. Most old users didn't join the new forum. And all the conversations was smartly hidden away this way. They can wash their hands off by saying - hey! It's available to read. We are not hiding anything. The worst was that they made the new forum bloody strict. This meant no more questioning the team. That was my tipping point. I installed arch and been happy. I saw Jonathon in Arch. Not sure whether he is working with Arch team.
They messed up a perfect system. They could just continue with the old way. Manjaro could've helped arch a lot. But they don't. They did revolutionise things like Manjaro Hardware Detection (MHWD) which automatically installs all your drivers including the graphics card in single click. You could install multiple kernel versions and switch between kernels. This was all nice at the time. But they borked it for some cash. Glad I moved on. Looks like they messed it up technically as well in the last 3+ years.