Almost all the major desktop environments have received a Manjaro distro

Mar 7, 2014 15:18 GMT  ·  By

Manjaro, the Linux distribution based on well-tested snapshots of the Arch Linux repositories and 100% compatible with Arch, has received a lot of other flavors, besides the officially supported ones.

The Manjaro Linux distribution was finally released to the public after numerous development versions, but if you remember correctly, there are only a handful of official flavors – Xfce, KDE, and Openbox.

But that doesn't mean that almost all the other possible flavors are not covered by community editions. There are seven in total: GNOME, Cinnamon, MATE, LXDE, Netbook Edition, Enlightenment, and Fluxbox.

“Community Editions are released as bonus flavors in addition to those officially supported and maintained by the Manjaro Team. Provided that the time and resources necessary are available to do so. The main things we’ve changed are the artwork and theming, as well as all of the notable package updates. Everybody can find an edition that suits them, as we now have 7 different community releases,” state the developers on their official blog.

We'll take them one at a time. The GNOME community edition is probably one of the most expected versions from the entire stack. It's based on GNOME 3.10.2 (the GNOME 3.12 is still under development) and it should provide a very good experience for users who are just getting ready to use Linux and Manjaro.

The second community edition is the Cinnamon one, which is based on the 2.0.4 release. This is not the latest one available, but it's one that has proven quite stable. According to the developers, Windows XP and Windows 7 users should feel at home with this flavor.

The third community edition flavor is MATE, a somewhat similar solution to GNOME2, but a little lighter on the system. It also works with the Compiz window manager, if you want to customize it.

The next item on the list is LXDE, which is also a lightweight desktop environment. This feels a lot like the official Xfce flavor, but it's even lighter.

The fifth flavor ready for a community edition deployment even has a very proper name, Netbook Edition. The developers say this distribution uses a lightweight Xfce implementation with a modified XFWM4 and DockBarX.

The Enlightenment flavor is quite different from all the rest and provides a breath of fresh air. It's not designed for new users, but if you want to try another approach to how things can work on a desktop, then the community edition based on Enlightenment is right up your alley.

The last community edition is based on Fluxbox 1.3.5, which is actually a window manager for the X Window System, and not a full desktop environment.