Manjaro 23.1 Vulcan released
Since we released Uranos in October 2023 we worked hard to get the next release of Manjaro out there. We call it Vulcan. This is also our first release on which we switch over to Pipewire 1.0.
The GNOME edition has received several updates to Gnome 45 series. This includes a lot of fixes and polish when Gnome 45 originally was released in September 2023. You can find the changes made to each point-release here: 45.1.
Highlights of 45 release series are:
One of the most noticeable changes in GNOME 45 is the new activities button. Located in the corner of the top bar, this button was previously labelled “Activities”. In GNOME 45, this static label has been replaced with a dynamic workspace indicator.
The new button design is a response to user testing results over recent years, and we are confident that its purpose will be more obvious to new GNOME users. As part of this change, the old app menu (which showed the name of the currently focused app), was also retired. This retirement was another response to user testing results, and was required to make space for the new design.
Search performance has been a major area of work for GNOME 45. These performance improvements have been made to a range of apps, including Software, Characters, Clocks, Files, and Calculator. Together, these changes result in faster search and reduced resource usage, which can be seen in both individual apps and in system search.
Many core GNOME apps are using new interface components in the 45 release. These new components bring a fresh new look, and also perform better across different window sizes and device form factors.
Lastly much work has also been done on search in the Files app. This has been given a significant speed boost, meaning that results are now returned in milliseconds, even when searching millions of files.
The Plasma edition comes with the latest Plasma 5.27 LTS series and KDE Gear 23.08.3. It brings exciting new improvements to your desktop.
This release includes a window tiling system, a more stylish app theme, cleaner and more usable tools, and widgets that give you more control over your machine. KDE’s designers have been hard at work reducing the number of pages in Plasma’s System Settings utility and moving smaller options in with other settings. Such is the case of the configuration for the animation when apps are launching, which now lives on the Cursors page. Additionally, the Highlight Changed Settings button has been moved to the hamburger menu for a cleaner look.
Migrating Plasma to the new Wayland display server technology has been no mean feat. But despite how hard the work has been, it is paying off, as Wayland opens many new ways to interact with your desktop. Plasma 5.27’s Wayland support is better than ever, with many bug fixes and reliability improvements throughout!
Dolphin 23.08 tweaks what it shows and how it shows it to give you a better idea of what you are looking at and what you can do with it. Dolphin hides temporary and backup files, uncluttering your view and stopping you from accidentally tampering with them. Other smaller details, like showing the progress of the calculation of the size of an item as it is happening, and the information of a selected file in the information panel (instead of showing the information of every file the cursor rolls over) help you get a clearer idea of what is going on in each moment.
We renamed Kalendar to Merkuro since the application not only lets you manage your events and tasks any more, but also your contacts. Skanpage, KDE’s scanning utility, now lets you re-order multi-page scans using drag-and-drop, and offers more adjustment options, like brightness, contrast, gamma, and color balance.
Itinerary is KDE’s travel assistant. Apart from reading and importing data from confirmation emails and SMS sent by airline companies, Itinerary can now import online railway tickets using the booking reference and passenger name, and grab booking details directly from the operator’s website. Note that this is currently only available for Deutsche Bahn and SNCF.
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 6.6 LTS is used for this release, such as the latest drivers available to date. With 6.1 LTS and 5.15 LTS we offer additional support for older hardware as needed.
We hope you enjoy this release and let us know what you think of Vulcan.
Release announcement
Downloads
Download Manjaro GNOME 23.1.0
Download Manjaro GNOME Minimal 23.1.0
Download Manjaro KDE 23.1.0
Download Manjaro KDE Minimal 23.1.0
Download Manjaro Xfce 23.1.0
Download Manjaro Xfce Minimal 23.1.0
Manjaro Linux 23.1 Vulcan is now available in GNOME (GNOME 45), KDE Plasma (Plasma 5.27 LTS), and Xfce (Xfce 4.18) flavors. The release also comes with Linux Kernel 6.6 LTS.
