The Manjaro Linux 21.2 distribution, built on Arch Linux and aimed at novice users, has been released. The distribution is notable for the presence of a simplified and user-friendly installation process, support for automatically detecting hardware and installing the drivers necessary for its operation. Manjaro comes in live builds with KDE (2.7 GB), GNOME (2.6 GB) and Xfce (2.4 GB) desktop environments. With the participation of the community, builds with Budgie, Cinnamon, Deepin, LXDE, LXQt, MATE and i3 are further developed.
To manage repositories, Manjaro uses its own toolkit BoxIt, designed in the image of Git. The repository is maintained on the principle of continuous inclusion of updates (rolling), but new versions go through an additional stage of stabilization. In addition to its own repository, there is support for using the AUR repository (Arch User Repository). The distribution is equipped with a graphical installer and a graphical interface for system configuration.
Main innovations:
- The Calamares installer provides the ability to choose a file system during automatic partitioning and improved support for Btrfs. This includes the ability to place paging files in the Btrfs file system, and the subvolume settings have been improved to simplify the rollback of changes and reduce the consumption of space by snapshots.
- The GNOME-based edition has been updated to the GNOME 41.2 release, and the layout of the elements on the screen is closer to the default GNOME settings. For those who prefer the old vertical layout of the desktop, it is possible to return the old settings via gnome-layout-switcher . Firefox has a GNOME-style theme enabled by default, which can also be changed to the classic Firefox look and feel via gnome-layout-switcher.
- The KDE-based edition has been updated to KDE Plasma 5.23, KDE Frameworks 5.88 and KDE Gears 21.12. The design theme is close to the main theme of Breeze. The highlighting of active elements in dialog boxes is provided when the window receives focus, the size of scroll bars is increased, the design of switches is changed. Improved KDE performance using the Wayland protocol.
- The main edition continues to ship with the Xfce 4.16 user environment.
- The Linux kernel has been updated to release 5.15.
Source: opennet.ru