Is Manjaro ARM dead?
Did the Manjaro ARM project die and nobody noticed?
Some of you might have noticed. Updates to Manjaro ARM packages are far between these days. Actually it has been far between updates since I left the project in March 2023.
So this begs the question: Is Manjaro ARM dead?
Lets take a look at the current status.
No new images
The last round of release images for all the major platforms Manjaro ARM supports was done in February 2023, release version 23.02. And I have heard that most of them break the installation after the first update.
The only images I have seen that has had any kind of new release since I left, are the Pinephone based ones. But they are still considered Beta (after 4 years!).
ARM download are no longer prominent on the website
Manjaro.org got a new fancy website a little while ago. This website hides the ARM images, so you have to really look for them to find them. Here's how you find them on the new website:
manjaro.org -> Download button -> Go back a step in the submenu that says Products > Download > x86 by pressing the Download entry -> Press the Download button in the second section called For Phones And Embedded.
Now you can see and download the ARM images.
Very few package updates
The Raspberry Pi specific packages have been updates steadily by Ray Sherman, the maintainer. But all the other Manjaro specific packages are only updated rarely or not at all.
Even the package updates from Arch Linux ARM is not done very often anymore. So the package repository in general is in a very bad out-of-date state.
Is it maintained?
With all these points, I would conclude that it is not really maintained anymore. Ray asked the Manjaro project management about this and was told that the ARM branch no longer has a manager and therefore it was no longer a priority by the Manjaro team.
To me, that sounds like it has died a slow and quiet death.
I would not recommend Manjaro ARM to anyone anymore, because of the state it is in. It's a sad conclusion, as I started the project with Josh Crowder back in 2016 and we loved working on it.