This month in Manjaro (March 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

Plasma Mobile Beta 11 released

This week the Manjaro ARM team released the Beta 11 for the Plasma Mobile image for the Pinephone and Pinephone Pro. This Beta contains Plasma 5.24 and Plasma Mobile Gear 22.02.

Week 2

QT5 updated to 5.15.3 after over a year

While QT itself is at version 6.2.X these days, they do have an LTS branch with version 5.15. It's not been updated for a while, because there was some confusion about the license going forward. But this week, they released 5.15.3 and KDE rebased their patches on that, which is now present in Manjaro repositories.

Firefox 98 issues

Firefox 98 was also released this week, but it came with it's share of issues. People have been reporting that video acceleration no longer work, it's no longer playing audio from sites like Spotify and it doesn't even show a window on aarch64/arm64.

Week 4

Gnome 42 and Plasma 5.24.4 released

This week we saw the release of the Gnome 42 desktop. However, it has not been updated in Arch yet, so it's not in Manjaro yet either. Gnome 42 has the switch to libadwaita so that might be slowing down its presence in the Arch repository.
We also saw the latest point release of Plasma, 5.24.4