This month in Manjaro (February 2022)

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

FOSDEM 2022

Some of the Manjaro developers attended some of the talks and stands of this online conference this year. Seems they have the Matrix/Online stuff down now, as it just works.

Week 2

Plasma 5.24 and Plasma Mobile Gear 22.02 releases

This week was a big week in plasma land. The latest (and likely the last) LTS of the Plasma desktop was released. 5.24 is the number and it brings in a grand number of improvements, especially to the Wayland session.

Around the same time Plasma Mobile Gear 22.02 was released. This brings in a couple of more features to the mobile centric interface, together with lots of bug fixes. Sadly the Plasma 5.24 also introduced a couple of regressions to the Plasma Mobile experience. One such regression is that the default wallpaper is no longer detected. Upstream speculation seems to indicate that the wallpaper changed file format from .png to .jpg in this Plasma cycle and for some reason Plasma Mobile does not pick up the .jpg. You can ofcourse still select your own wallpaper from the Configure Wallpaper interface like before.

Week 3

Updates to the GCC toolchain

Both x86_64 and aarch64 saw updates to the GCC toolchain this week. The biggest update was on the ARM side though, as they updated from glibc/binutis/gcc 2.33/2.35/10.2 to 2.35/2.38/11.2 respectively. This of course meant lots of stuff needed to be rebuilt (mostly kernels).