My experience with the Manjaro Forums

This is about my past 2 years experience with these people, but to be honest it is an experience with some of them, not the majority of them. The article won’t be as long as it should since I linked to a bunch of discussions to highlight my points. In all, the Manjaro Forums are littered here and there with very mean schoolgirls that I felt like they conspired against me and TROMjaro :)). And TROMjaro became, from a Manjaro “spin” that was appreciated by a bunch on their forum, to this black sheep that admins got allergic to. And I wonder why since I’ve been very friendly there….let’s see. We debated about the trade-free idea, morality and ethics, about Manjaro and TROMjaro, and more.

I added some videos of me scrolling through the threads I linked to just in case Manjaro removes them. You can easily pause the videos to read through them. It is almost like I scroll for ya’ :). If the videos cannot be played in the browser, right click and “save link as” and watch them on your computer.

I like computers. They are a great tool that let you express your thoughts and do stuff. You can write articles, make videos, podcasts, websites, software, and so forth. My relationship with them started in the late 90s when we had a very old computer – so old you won’t recognize that as a computer. Black and white, using floppy disks. I was playing around through the MSDos system back then. It even had 2-3 old and weird games installed.

In the early 2000 a french lady came to Romania (via a school program or whatever) and stayed at our place. Eventually she bought us a Pentium computer. Now in color. Now even bigger floppy disks. I was playing Aladin and other such games, while poking around Windows 95. I quickly learned a thing or two about Windows and evolved with a few Pentium computers and pirated versions of Win98, later on XP, Vista or Windows 7.

For more than 10 years I was playing with Windows. I was the guy you would call to install Windows on your computer or repair your Windows installation. I tweaked Windows to its limits so much so that I remember one day the “internet” guy came to set up my connection and windows looked so different that he was unable to navigate my computer. Like you would click a tree and the file manager will open haha. I spent so much time in front of the computer back then, learning how to make websites, edit videos or photos, and much more.

I never knew of another operating system. Until around 2012 when I started to hear more and more about Ubuntu and Linux. Back then Windows was pushing an awful update called “windows-ads-8”. They started to push ads inside the operating system and made it collect as much data as possible, and overall I felt like I don’t have control over this monster.

I tried Ubuntu and I was super impressed about this new world of Open Source. No drivers needed (everything worked out of the box), a Software Center (so bye bye using Google to install weird .exe files), and so easy to customize. I liked it so much that I migrated to it for several years, learning more and more about what Linux and Open Source are.

Although there were so many Linux distributions out there (Ubuntu being one of them), and me testing many of them, one stood up. Manjaro. Manjaro brought what Ubuntu lacked: super easy installation of software and access to a lot more software than Ubuntu by default. Their “software center” was full of every app, driver, and package you can imagine. I loved it. I didn’t have to use the terminal ever again to install some specific packages like I did in Ubuntu. Manjaro was also pushing updates faster so you got to taste the bleeding edge of the Open Source. After 4 years of using Ubuntu I switched to Manjaro.

Manjaro also had a great forum full of knowledge and from my experience back then, full of very nice people.

I am doing a lot of online work. I write books, make documentaries, videos, curate videos, news, software, documentaries, courses, I have a music website, a personal blog, and more. I am super busy so I need a computer that works. Although Manjaro didn’t work very well out of the box, in time I made it work thanks to the updates pushed by the Open Source community and some help from the Manjaro forums. I wanted to help Manjaro by suggesting some (maybe) knowledgeable improvements from my past experience with Windows and Ubuntu.

I started by making this post on their forum in 2018 “What I would add/change to Manjaro” (video). I just wanted to suggest some improvements.

The feedback was overall nice and at times useful, but then you’d see comments like this out of nowhere:

we seem to have this topic every couple of months and almost always posted by a newcomer hell-bent on changing Manjaro to their vision of what they want it to be without paying the dues necessary to even really now what that is. Not in truth.

Maybe you could read their posts and you little gossip-whores can get your ■■■■ together on this topic?

My best advice is to get some more (a lot more) time under your belt truly using Manjaro as-designed. Really learn Manjaro, rather than your very limited, mostly cursory examination before you go anywhere else with this topic.

Your post is specious at best.

You can read the entire thing for yourself to see that all I wanted was to suggest some improvements. A month later, this guy Jonathon closed the thread out of the blue with the message “I need to read through this thread. Call me tomorrow.”. Tomorrow never came for Jonathon or no one called him because that thread remained closed.

I said ok….you know, their forum, their rules. Interestingly after months, they did implement one of my suggestions from that post: to sort installed applications by date. So apparently it was a useful suggestion in the end.

Next I thought to suggest to them to add more types of packages in their Software Center, like appimages, snaps or flatpaks. “Appimages, snaps, and flatpaks in Manjaro’s Package Manager” (video). That post got a lot of attention and the responses were mixed. The discussion seemed a bit more fruitful, but guys like this Jonathon either started to have a crush on me or hated me for some reason. 🙂

He’s sarcasm is palpable :).

In the end I understood that it can be a bit complicated to add these other packages to the same software center. I said ok, I got their points. Now, 2 years later and they did just that. Flatpaks and Snaps are integrated into their Software Center….and it is great. But seeing so many no-sayers being bothered by a mere suggesting such an idea, was depressing.

In time I wanted to suggest some applications that were not found in their Software Center so maybe they can add them. I didn’t know how that works so I thought to suggest stuff. This (video) post is an example how the discussion escalates very quickly into a very mean tone. Jonathon seems to be my nemesis haha. At the end of this thread he posted a comment then closed the thread so I can’t reply. Later on we at TROM ended up making an app for AUR for that image converter that I was suggesting…And also, like Jonathon suggested, to make a post and ask if anyone can add these apps to their repositories, I did so here (video). No one did them. We made them eventually…

After some more discussions on their forum I decided to build my own version of Manjaro since that could be easier than requesting this or that. I said it could be a great way to also showcase this idea of trade-free in action, applied to software. I did so, after weeks of learning how. I got some help here and there on their forums. And I did it.

I even asked (video) how to not duplicate the work and be part of their team to add new applications to their repositories, but that led to nowhere….I wanted to help directly, I asked how, but I wasn’t able to.

A few months later everyone started to get pissed off when Manjaro made a deal with a company called FreeOffice and started to promote their Office Suite instead of LibreOffice, which was trade-free. Basically Manjaro wanted to ship with FreeOffice by default and get rid of LibreOffice. FreeOffice is a freeware, meaning that they use the word “free” but it is almost as relevant as using the word “meat” as in MeatOffice, since they are so much about Free as they are about Meat. They are selling pro subscriptions if users want to really use their software. We know this tactic very well. All companies engage in it. So I, like others, wrote about it on their forum. My comment started here. What followed was a heated debate of the influence of trades on such projects. And, again, in the end, after such discussions, Manjaro agreed not to ship with MeatOffice installed by default. Maybe my noise added to the decision, yet while making the noise, people on the forum jumped at me like wild dogs.

I finished TROMjaro and I wanted to showcase it on their forum since they have a section where people post their versions of Manjaro. And so I did here (video).

This post is now locked and hidden from Manjaro’s forum or any search engine, so no one can see it unless they have the link. What was so awful about this thread that they made it like that? I recommend you to read it for yourself to judge. Basically all I wanted is to showcase what we did with TROMjaro. But shortly after, I was accused that all I wanted was to promote our “ideology” and such….

This Jonathon even moved the discussion about the “ideology” to a different thread, so that we “keep on point” in the first one. Here (video) he moved it. Guess what? He closed it in a few days or hours, I don’t remember….There is a interesting discussion in this thread and I recommend you read it ;). We basically debated over this trade-free idea. What is trade and so forth. It is an interesting discussion overall. I tried my best to keep calm and reply to their points. In the end their questions were very silly but well….

I tried to communicate with these people over private messages as seen here:

One of the private messages is in romanian since the guy was apparently from romania – he contacted me to “threaten” me haha

And this one when I contacted Jonathon about him editing my comments:

Aaron also posted about TROMjaro in their German section of the website, to then have its post removed entirely by the same Jonathon. Aaron contacted the guy in charge of Manjaro (since the guy is from Germany) but not much was done….

It is interesting that when I first made TROMjaro and showcased it to some people on some threads on their forum, some of them recommended me to brand it as TROMjaro to be better like that (more unique). We were using the Manjaro logos and such, because I didn’t care. Yes it was and still is Manjaro with some tweaks and unique features. Actually the guy in charge of Manjaro’s Gnome version (what we use) thought me how to brand TROMjaro so that I can remove the Manjaro branding. And so we did. To later on be “accused” that all we did is to remove Manjaro’s branding and added our own….

I really started to feel like on the Manjaro’s forum there are a bunch of mean schoolgirls that want to poke at you, and from that moment on, after the post about TROMjaro that got the attention of thousands of people, I was doomed on that forum :). I simply could not mention TROMjaro without someone being “mean” to me about it. Like take this recent post where someone asked what others think about TROMjaro and the first reply is from my crush, Jonathon, who says:

It is not the first time he deflects people from TROMjaro to other Linux Distributions. Funny part is that he recommended one that is already dead, Cleanjaro. Better dead than sorry, right!? :))

Over the past 2 years I think I mentioned TROMjaro a few more times, and others did it too, for sure, but I do not know if all of these posts are still available or not on their forum. They are keen to close threads and/or make them invisible. At one point this Jonathon started to edit my comments to remove links to our TROM books when they were questioning me about our trade-free idea. They were saying that linking to our stuff is promotion….I mean these are the sources I have about the idea. Jeez…

Seeing their childish attitude I decided to forget about their forums completely, despite me using them in the past to help others too, so not only to fix my own computer problems. Until today….

You see, Manjaro pushes a lot of updates almost weekly. That’s great since it means a lot of new features. But that also means users are bothered with constant update notifications. On top of that, it makes it mathematically more likely for the system to break here and there if you push so many updates. Overall we keep TROMjaro super simple and updates go smoothly most of the time. At times they break stuff and I have to deal with the aftermath for TROMjaro users that contact us, and the same is true for manjaro that has to deal with the same aftermath but in larger quantities. From my experience Manjaro could make it easier for people to deal with the updates and also to install and remove software. Just a few minor improvements can make the experience better in my view. And so, like in the past, I thought to make a post on their forum to tell them about my ideas. And guess what happened? 🙂 They closed the thread in a few hours after I posted. Am I that evil? Please read the thread if you have the time and decide if this thread should have been closed… “A few ideas about handling the installation and updates of software in Manjaro after 1 year of experience” (video).

I was about to add this comment when they closed again the thread:

As the story goes, maybe in a few months time they will take these suggestions into account….

It is sad to see this attitude from an Open Source project. Maybe some of these creatures got too bothered by all kinds of users posting crap on their forum and their patience is as thin and robust as a fart in a storm. 🙂

I wanted to make this blog post to let people know about all this. I will definitely stop posting on their forums. It is beyond ridiculous how they handled my threads and comments. Maybe you have the time to go through these pages of content, maybe you don’t, but it is the proof that some of Manjaro Forum admins are like little kids that get protective with their toys and if they get pissed off by you then you can fuck off cause they will forever hate you! “meanfaceemoji”.

The good part is that, Manjaro being open source, I can continue the work on TROMjaro uninterrupted and undisturbed. Despite our differences we can use each other’s work. I can suggest features to Manjaro directly to their project’s Gitlab pages and forget about their forum. There at least it seems like they are more “pro” and these mean little girls from the forum do not travel to such places that often.

In the end, I made some of them think a bit about this trade-free idea and I’m sure TROMjaro made them curious a bit in like “what the fuck is this”. At least that, if not more ;).