Manjaro Linux 0.8.13 Released

A new stable update for Manjaro has been released: Manjaro 0.8.13. Manjaro 0.8.13 is the latest version in the ever popular operating system based on Arch-Linux. The development team took its time with this release, which is powered by Plasma 5.3.1, Xfce4.12, KDE Apps 15.04.1, and KDE Frameworks5.10.0. The four months of development seem justified after taking a look at all the changes and improvements this branch underwent.

The KDE flavor received a lot of attention in this update. According to the development team “…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 5.3 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.”

Thunar now supports tabs and other cool features such as inverting the selection and pop-up calendars, display settings have been improved, and the window manager now comes with smart placement optimizations so users can determine the best spot to place a new window.

The most notable improvements in Manjaro 0.8.13 are the numerous fixes made to the installer, “Thus.” With these fixes, users now have the ability to install Manjaro on SD cards. This could be extremely helpful on laptops where boot drive runs Windows and Linux fans want to keep it that way. The ability to boot to an SD card will also allow Linux newbies to try a Linux-based OS without tanking their Windows install when partitioning.

Unfortunately, the Linux Kernel is not bleeding edge, and is still at 3.18. Don’t get too upset though; stability is more important than anything and Kernel 4.x should be released soon enough in addition to Manjaro 0.9. Ready to download Manjaro 0.8.13? Get it here.