14 DAY TRIAL // Manjaro KDE 0.8.10 RC1, a Linux distribution based on well-tested snapshots of the Arch Linux repositories and 100% compatible with Arch, is now available for download.
The next version of Manjaro, 0.8.10, is shaping up nicely and its various flavors have started to show up, including KDE. This particular distro is built by the community, but it uses the regular 0.8.10 release as its base.
“We are proud to announce our release candidate for our KDE Edition. This time we have either a larger install media with all supported language packages out of the box or a minimal install media just supporting English.”
“All other language packages can be installed thru our Manjaro Settings tool easily later on. This time we ship KDE 4.13.1 and all the latest KDE applications you know. The minimal edition has Linux 3.14.4 as kernel. The full version goes with Linux 3.12.20 instead,” said the developers in their blog post.
The first thing you will notice is that the Manjaro KDE devs didn't just settle with a bland implementation of KDE and they've tried to customize it a little. You will still notice that it's KDE, but it feels better than the stock version that is usually implemented in Linux distributions.
Even the Dolphin file manager is quite different, the Thus graphical installer has been improved, a 1 MB offset has been added for GRUB, an install issue in Turkish locales has been fixed, plymouth has been updated to match the distribution, and many other fixes and changes have been implemented.
This is just the first update and more will likely follow. After all the official flavors are out, users should start seeing the community editions soon.
The users have been asked to test the distribution and to see if they can contribute in any way to the development process. In any case, if you decide to test this Linux distribution, you might consider giving it a try in a virtual machine, for the first time, or you could use a hard disk that doesn't have any data on it.
More details about this release can be found in the official announcement. You can download Manjaro KDE 0.8.10 RC1 right now from Softpedia.
Remember that this is a development version and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended for testing purposes only and it's possible to ruin any other distributions that you are already using.