Manjaro 21.2.0 Qonos released!
Since we released Pahvo Mid-Season this year all our developer teams worked hard to get the next release of Manjaro out there. We call it Qonos.
This release features major improvements to Calamares, including filesystem selection for automatic partitioning and enhanced support for btrfs. For btrfs installations, the default subvolume layout has been improved for easier rollbacks and less wasted space on snapshots. Additionally, swapfiles on btrfs filesystem are now supported.
The Gnome edition has received a major rework the update to Gnome 41.2. The default layout has been redesigned to follow more closely upstream defaults, with some adjustments to reduce the pointer travel for users who prefer using mouse with gnome.
For users that preferred the old vertical desktop layout, we have the Manjaro legacy layout, which mimics the previous gnome defaults. We made sure that all the layouts shipped with gnome-layout-switcher still work after the transition to Gnome 41.
Firefox now comes with the gnome-desktop style theme enabled by default for more consistent look with the desktop, but this can be toggled with one click from gnome-layout-switcher for users preferring the native Firefox look.
The Plasma edition comes with the latest Plasma 5.23 series, Frameworks 5.88 and Applications (Gear) 21.12. We polished our default theme even more to match upstream Breeze theming. Active elements in a dialog window, for example, “light up” when the window gets focus, checkboxes show actual ticks and radio buttons switch on like bulbs. Scrollbars and spinboxes are bigger, making them more accessible and easier to use with touchscreens, but have been re-designed in such a way as to still look elegant on desktop and laptop machines.
Making Plasma fully functional under Wayland is a priority for the KDE Community. Wayland will enable you to do much more on the desktop, improved performance, increased stability and mew features, such as those required by devices with touchscreens. Entering tablet mode in Wayland increases the size of System Tray icons, making them easier to tap on a touchscreen. The System Tray will also notify you when something is recording the screen and will let you cancel it. In System Settings, under Global Theme > Colors you’ll find a new option that lets you pick the desktops accent colors. Accent colors are the colors of highlighted items on drop-down menus and lists, backgrounds of the icons of selected apps in the panel, the actual bars in progress bars, the backgrounds of checkboxes and radio buttons, and so on.
With our XFCE edition, we have now Xfce 4.16. The window manager received lots of updates and improvements again in the area of compositing and GLX. Support for fractional scaling was added to the display dialog, along with highlighting the preferred mode of a display with an asterisk and adding aspect ratios next to resolutions. The settings manager has improved search and filter capabilities. Thunar file manager received a boatload of fixes and quite a few notable features, including pause for copy/move operations, support for queued file transfer, remembering view settings per directory and support for transparency in Gtk themes.
Kernel 5.15 LTS is used for this release, such as the latest drivers available to date. With 5.4 LTS and 5.10 LTS we offer additional support for older hardware as needed.
We hope you enjoy this release and let us know what you think of Qonos.
The final version of Manjaro 21.2.0 Qonos with Kernel 5.15 LTS, GNOME 41.2, KDE Plasma 5.23.4, and Xfce 4.16 has been released.
