It turned out to be a complete mess. From my experience it's easier to switch to than from systemd... in Arch at least. I'm not convinced it is a non-desired effect.

There are tutorials that refer to repos that don't exist anymore (getting 404 errors), some indicate steps that no longer apply or others that leave you with a messed up system. The tutorial I followed left me with a graphics system where my keyboard and touchpad and mouse no longer worked. Unusable for short.

There's also a migration guide from Arch/Manjaro to Artix. But the migration tutorial is the one I followed, only to find my system too much messed up to fix.

I then saw a video (in French) that demonstrates how to install Manjaro with OpenRC using Manjaro Architect. So I decided to follow the steps. At some point, i.e. configuring the base packages you're prompted with a choice: openrc vs systemd . Unfortunately I goofed up during the installation and thought I'd just have to restart all over again, which I did. I don't know why but – and I re-started the installation 7 times – the option between openrc and systemd ... had gone, leaving me with only one choice: systemd . In none of my attempts could I get the choice back. Even overwriting the USB installation media didn't help. So I concluded the installer probably had been updated and openrc was no longer an option in Manjaro.

I finally installed Gentoo for that's the only system I know that gives me that choice and control. Gentoo was my first distribution back in 2004 so I'm not in Alien area. And thanks to Gentoo developers for providing openrc . They deserve being praised for that.

This concludes a bad trip.