Manjaro 0.8.12-rc1 released
With this release we have focused our efforts, bringing more attention to the common core requirements of Manjaro’s broad user-base.
The Xfce edition remains our flagship offering and has received the attention it deserves. Few can claim to offer such a polished, integrated and leading-edge Xfce experience. We ship components from the Xfce 4.11 series after having tested them in-house, ensuring suitability for everyday use. This edition now uses LightDM for login management, display locking and user switching, including custom integration for Xfce.
Spearheaded by the Turkish Manjaro community, our KDE4 edition continues to deliver this powerful, mature and feature-rich desktop environment with a unique look-and-feel, and with the perks of Manjaro’s latest tools.
The Linux kernel used on the 0.8.12 installation media is the 3.16 series. This series of kernel has been selected for it’s blend of stability, long-term viability and modern features & hardware support.
Our Menda themes have been re-based on the excellent Vertex by horst3180, with a great deal of Manjaro customisations and additions. Our Menda look-and-feel has been extended to include Numix-based icons and Breeze-based cursor theme, both modified to best match Manjaro’s styling.
Relative to the last installation media release, our tools have been improved and polished.
The Manjaro Settings Manager now provides an easy-to-use graphical interface for installing and removing the many series’ of kernels we offer. Manjaro’s selection of readily available kernels remains the most extensive of any Linux distribution that we know of.
At the time of this 0.8.12 release, seven series of kernel are available directly from our binary repositories, ranging from the mature & rock-solid 3.10 series through to the latest 3.18 release. Such a wide array of available kernel options results in extensive hardware support, getting you the most out of your system, whether it be old or new.
The Manjaro Settings Manager now also includes friendly graphical interfaces for adjusting system date/time settings and for customising notifications for available kernel & language pack updates.
Both of our graphical package management tools have received important updates. Our Qt package management tool, Octopi, is now at version 0.5 bringing many improvements and bug-fixes, and shipped using Qt5 for the main interface. Alternate to the generic updates notifier, a notifier package with initial KDE Frameworks 5 support is also available.
Our GTK package management tool, Pamac, has just seen it’s 2.1 release. This release is compatible with Pacman 4.2, and especially, a significant performance boost plus better AUR support.
Steam is now provided with two launcher choices, one for using the native system libraries and one for using the Steam compatibility libraries, in an effort to offer the best compatibility and performance for different Steam games.
With this update we have updated some of our kernels (3.10.65, 3.12.36, 3.14.29, 3.18.3, 3.19-rc5) All support now early microcode loading.
Our OpenRC-Team worked hard and updated lot of our openrc packages to fix and improve this alternative init-system.
Rob McCathie decided to push the netbook kernel into our community repos. We also updated pacman and our graphical package managers pamac and octopi.
Most of our core-tools got modified for our next stable release 0.8.12. We will also present new install medias within this update.
This includes also regular Archlinux upstream fixes (Jan 22 18:34:25 CET 2015). Please give us feedback and report any findings with this update.
kind regards
Philip Müller Manjaro Development Team