The release of Manjaro Linux 25.0 has been published, built on Arch Linux and aimed at beginner users. The distribution is notable for its simplified and user-friendly installation process, support for automatic hardware detection, and installation of the necessary drivers. Manjaro is available as live builds with graphical environments KDE (4.5 GB and 3.7 GB), GNOME (4.3 GB and 3.1 GB), and Xfce (4 GB and 3.2 GB), designed for x86_64 architecture and various ARM-based platforms. Additionally, community-driven builds with Budgie, Cinnamon, Deepin, LXQt, and i3 are under development.
Manjaro uses its own toolset, BoxIt, designed in the image of Git, for managing repositories. The repository operates on a rolling release principle, but new versions undergo an additional stabilization phase. In addition to its own repository, support for the Arch User Repository (AUR) is available. The distribution is equipped with a graphical installer and a graphical interface for system configuration.
Release Features:
- The GNOME-based edition has been updated to GNOME 48, which includes support for HDR, triple buffering, a stack layout for notifications, and global keyboard shortcuts. The configurator has been expanded with optimizations for memory usage and performance.
- The KDE-based edition has been updated to KDE Plasma 6.3 and KDE Gear 24.12.
- The Xfce-based edition has been updated to version 4.20.
- The Linux kernel has been updated to version 6.14. Additionally, packages with LTS kernel releases 6.1 and 6.6 are available.
The first alpha release of the Manjaro Summit edition has been separately presented, in which the system environment is distributed as a single monolithic image, mounted in read-only mode and updated entirely in an atomic manner. An installation image with GNOME, sized 2 GB (x86_64), is available for download, supporting boot only on UEFI systems. Currently, only GNOME is supported as a desktop environment, but templates for creating builds with KDE Plasma, Xfce, and COSMIC are available (for example, to install KDE, the command 'arkdep deploy manjaro-summit-kde' can be executed).
The monolithic system image is built on the Arch Linux package base using the arkdep toolkit, developed by the Arkane Linux project. The toolkit is written in Bash and acts as a wrapper around GNU Coreutils, wget, curl, and Systemd. To install an update, the command 'sudo arkdep deploy' should be used, and to assess changes in the proposed update — 'arkdep diff'.
The file system used is Btrfs. Updates are performed by loading a new system image into a separate Btrfs subvolume and switching to it during boot. In case of issues, there is an option to roll back to a previous state (in case of failure during the new image boot process, this rollback is done automatically using systemd-bless-boot). New updates are generated once a week.
Additional software is installed in packages in Flatpak format. Programs can also be installed as separate layers from the system; for example, to install Firefox, you can execute 'arkdep layer firefox'. To install graphical programs in containers and create environments with components from other distributions, the Distrobox toolkit and the BoxBuddy graphical interface are included. There is a mode to disable write protection on the root partition and use the default package manager pacman, but packages installed this way will be lost after the next system update and will need to be reinstalled.
Source: opennet.ru
