This month in Manjaro (December 2021)
This is my periodic posts on whats going on in Manjaro land.
It's a small collection of notable changes, updates and community news in and for the Manjaro community.
As I am a Manjaro ARM developer, some of the information will probably be ARM-biased.
See this as a Manjaro Podcast, but in written form.
Week 1
Plasma Mobile Gear 21.12 released
Finally the new release of Plasma Mobile Gear is out. Delayed a couple of times, but now it's finally here. Lots of updates and a couple of new additions. Some applications have moved into Plasma Mobile Gear family, like Neochat, KHealthCirtificate and Vakzination. See the link above for more information.
New Breath theme available
The Manjaro artwork team has been working hard on updating the current Breath2 theme. This resulted in a preview some months back, called Breath 2021. This week a new iteration was packaged, simple called Breath. The old Breath2 has been renamed to Breath Classic, so users can still have their old Manjaro look and feel on their Plasma desktop. The new Breath theme also includes a migration package called plasma5-themes-breath-migration, which when installed, changes your user settings to use the new themes.
Week 2
Pinephone Pro images are now available
We have been working hard on getting images ready for the Pinephone Pro dev units that have gone out to the developers in the last couple of weeks. So while we have had our unstable dev images for a couple of weeks now, this week we made our Factory Image for the Pinephone and Pinephone Pro available. This is the current image at the time of writing this post, so it will likely get updated in the near future.
Week 3
Manjaro ARM 21.12 released!
This week the ARM team released the 21.12 version of all the images. This release has 6 editions for 16 different devices, where the newest device to be supported is the Radxa Zero. The Radxa Zero is a device in the RPI Zero formfactor, but much more powerful. Manjaro only boots from microSD at this time. And sadly only if Android is present on the eMMC.
Manjaro ARM Sway 21.12 not installing
We found a bug in all our Sway based ARM images, that makes Calamares crash with an error when trying to complete the setup. We have now fixed this and as such had to completely rebuild all the images.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year
The Manjaro and Manjaro ARM teams wishes you all a merry christmas and a happy new year. 2021 has brought lots of improvements and changes to Manjaro and we are sure 2022 will bring the more stuff.