Manjaro 0.8.13-pre1 released

After one week of development we are proud to present to you our first preview of our next stable release, Manjaro 0.8.13. This time we ship XFCE 4.12 tweaked and patched to have the best XFCE experience possible and Plasma 5.2.2, KDE Frameworks 5.8.0 (which fixes issues we had in VirtualBox and VMware) and latest KDE Apps 14.12.3!

New in XFCE

Thunar file manager finally supports tabs and other cool features like inverting the selection, improves on location handling and the shortcuts side pane. On the panel we have now a popup calendar and support for timezones. The settings area has improved display settings with the ability to clone displays via the GUI and other basic monitor management options. Last but not least, the window manager has smart placement optimizations for determining the best area to place a new window where it’s least covered on the screen. It also now supports alinging windows next to each other rather than using random gaps.

New in KDE

With this new release of Plasma 5 providing a visually updated core desktop experience that is easy to use and familiar to the user. Changes under the hood of KDE include the migration to a new, fully hardware-accelerated graphics stack centered around an OpenGL(ES) scenegraph. Plasma is built using Qt 5 and Frameworks 5. Plasma 5.2 introduces a new major version of KDE’s workspace offering. The Manjaro Art Team has forked the new KDE Breeze set and named it Maia to follow in line with the rest of our visually appealing desktops, this artwork concept introduces cleaner visuals and improved readability.

Thus changes

  • Refractor chroot.py, unmount dirs in reverse, more debug logging
  • Bootloader, install grub efi in a chroot
  • Mount special dirs at the start of configure_system functions
  • Fix mounting special dirs
  • Fix bootloader checking logic
  • Slice the efi_path correctly
  • Remove –verbose flag when installing grub-install
  • Use default value when creating last partition with sgdisk
  • Remove useless code
  • Call grub-install with verbose option, for debugging
  • Pass efi path in automatic mode
  • Calculate partition sizes using integer divisions
  • Use correct device partition number in automatic partitioning
  • Round up swap size in automatic installation
  • Fix validation in user_info
  • Make sure part sizes are ints
  • Mount boot (/boot) before efi (/boot/efi) partition
  • Don’t mount/unmount within mkinitcpio
  • Fix grub-install call
  • Add efi partition size when calculating root partition size
  • Fix some typos in slides
  • Add gtk 3.16 compatibility
  • Fix bootloader crash
  • More efi fixing
  • Fix double-installation attempt of bootloader
  • Fix broken creation of /home folder for user
  • Fix issue with wrong ssd options in /etc/fstab
  • Remove pulseaudio-ctl call
  • Fix crash when detecting ssd
  • Efi partition is /boot/efi
  • Add more translation strings
  • Fix forward labeling issue
  • Fix slide order in check
  • Fix translation issues
  • Added new slides by David Linares
  • LUKS support in advanced mode (manual partitioning)
  • Bootloader installation is now optional in all modes
  • PEPified code
  • Tweaked UI
  • Update translations

This release comes with XFCE 4.12, KDE Plasma 5.2.2, linux318 kernel and all the usual Manjaro and upstream updates. Testing branch was used to create these install medias. Please give us feedback and report any issues with this release.

kind regards Philip Müller, Manjaro Development Team

Written on April 17, 2015