Why the Manjaro Linux distribution builds with GitLab

The Manjaro project is the newest member of the GitLab Open Source Partners community. Linux users know the Manjaro project as an open source operating system that is fast, reliable, and user-friendly. We recently caught up with project leaders Philip Müller and Bernhard Landauer to learn how GitLab helps the Manjaro community accomplish its great work.

Join us at Open Source Summit Europe 2023 to learn more about GitLab's dedication to open source.

Why the Manjaro project moved to GitLab

In 2018, the Manjaro community decided to adopt GitLab as its development platform, citing several key motivations:

• Achieve greater data sovereignty. By migrating to a new development platform, Manjaro wanted to gain greater control over project development infrastructure. The community now hosts its own dedicated GitLab instance, where all critical Manjaro development occurs. The move has meant greater freedom and autonomy for the community. "It feels really good to self-host and have our own control," Landauer said.
• Empower a small group of volunteers. Like so many other open source projects, Manjaro relies on the dedicated work of volunteer contributors from across the world. Müller explained that the project needed a toolkit that could equip a core group of 16 developers to maintain more than 3,000 packages and foster a community of roughly 8,000 participants. GitLab's sophisticated CI/CD functionality helps the community scale to empower its relatively small developer team to manage ever-increasing complexity.
• Expand monitoring capabilities. Using GitLab grants community leads much greater visibility into the project's operations, Müller said. By configuring various activity feeds, maintainers can more efficiently monitor potential pipeline issues and build failures across projects in the Manjaro namespace. Adopting GitLab also produced an interesting network effect for Manjaro: Using the same platform as peers, dependencies, and upstream projects meant greater overall visibility into Manjaro's open source ecosystem. "Projects like GNOME and KDE are switching also over to GitLab," Müller said. "We can look at what the upstream is doing."

Watch the interview

To learn more about Manjaro's use of GitLab, watch the full interview.

Join us at Open Source Summit Europe 2023 to learn more about GitLab's dedication to open source.