Manjaro 22.0 Sikaris released
Manjaro 22.0 Since we released Ruah in June all our developer teams worked hard to get the next release of Manjaro out there. We call it Sikaris.
The GNOME edition has received a major update to Gnome 43. It comes with a redesigned system status menu, which allows quickly changing commonly used settings. Settings which previously required digging into menus can now be changed with the click of button. The new design also makes it easy to see the status of your settings at a glance.
Our in-house Layouts Switcher application has gained some new features as well as various improvements and fixes: Now you can create your own dynamic wallpaper. With Gradience you can customize your theme simple from within the application. There are many presents available to choose from or you can create your own. By toggling a radio button the Firefox Gnome theme can fetch its latest version automatically from upstream.
Additionally we managed to get our green branding back. Therefore we created some Gnome packages we tagged with Maia. This includes accent colours, colouring on the login screen, folder clours and Qt theming.
The Plasma edition comes with the latest Plasma 5.26 series and KDE Gear 22.12. Even with a bare-bones installation, Plasma lets you customize your desktop a lot. If you want more, there is always Plasma’s vast ecosystem of widgets. Addons, widgets, plasmoids… They all refer to the same thing. The clock and calendar in your panel, the notifier, your KDE Connect monitor, the volume control; these are all widgets, and all can be added elsewhere, moved around, removed and, in true Plasma fashion, modified to an extreme degree.
On your Workspaces it is now not only the windows decorations that change when you move from a light theme to a dark theme: the wallpaper will change as well! Talking of light and dark, you have been able to adjust the warmth of the colors of your desktop for some time now, using warmer, reddish colors at night (better for your eyes) and having Plasma adjust the color automatically when the sun goes down and now you can now do that for the day time too.
Dolphin, the file manager, adds a new feature called Selection Mode: Hit the spacebar and a light green bar will appear at the top of the file view. You can now click or tap files and folders and quickly and easily select the ones you want to work with. When you want to reply to a text message using the KDE Connect widget, the text field is now inline rather than in a separate dialog window, making it more convenient to answer when working on your computer.
With our XFCE edition, we have now Xfce 4.18. Here some highlights: A new file highlighting feature (accessed from the file properties dialog) in Thunar file manager lets you set a custom colour background and a custom foreground text colour – an effective way to call attention to specific file(s) in a directory laden with similar-looking mime types. On the subject of finding files, Thunar includes recursive search.
The panel picks up a pair of new preferences. First, panel length is now configured in pixels rather than percentages, as before. Second, there’s a new “keep panel above windows” option. This allows maximised app windows to fill the area behind the panel rather than maximise its bottom or top edge to sit flush against it.
Control Centre groups all of the desktop’s various modules for managing the system into one easy-to-use window. New options are present in many of these. For example you can disable header bars in dialogs from the Appearance module; show or hide a ‘delete’ option in file context menus from Desktop; and pick a default multi-monitor behaviour before you attach an additional screen – dead handy, that.
Kernel 6.1 is used for this release, such as the latest drivers available to date. With 5.15 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 Sikaris.
The latest version of Manjaro, version 22.0 Sikaris, has been released. It comes with major updates to the kernel (version 6.1), GNOME (version 43), Plasma (version 5.26), and Xfce (version 4.18).
