14 DAY TRIAL // Manjaro KDE is a Linux distribution that uses snapshots of the Arch Linux repositories and a custom version of KDE. The developers have just pushed version 0.9.0 Pre1 (Bellatrix 0.9.0) out the door and they made quite a few improvements.
We praised the 0.8.11 branch of Manjaro KDE for making KDE exist again. There are few developers out there that go through the trouble of presenting something new to users, even if it's just their personal vision of the desktop. Far too many distros just ship out with the vanilla KDE experience, saying that it's up to users to customize it, but it's a good thing when developers make the customizations themselves.
Just like it happens with most of the other operating systems (and this is true not only for the Linux ones), most users will make a minimum set of adjustments to the desktop. It doesn't mean that the desktop environment is not capable of much more; it just means that users don't really know what it's capable of. If you have started a KDE-powered distro until now, you will immediately see the difference.
Manjaro KDE 0.9.0 Pre1 is out and ready for testing
The Manjaro team gave us a heads-up regarding this release before it reached the regular channels. We got a chance to test it and it feels like a real upgrade over 0.8.11. They managed to provide a different KDE experience and it's hard to identify the desktop just with a simple look, which is actually a good thing in this case.
"With this new release of Plasma 5 KDE is providing a visually updated core desktop experience that is easy to use and familiar to the user. Changes under the hood of KDE include the migration to a new, fully hardware-accelerated graphics stack centered around an OpenGL(ES) scenegraph. Plasma is built using Qt 5 and Frameworks 5. Plasma 5.0 introduces a new major version of KDE’s workspace offering," reads the official announcement,
The makers of Manjaro KDE are also using the new Calamares installer, the original Breeze theme on KDE has been forked and adapted for this system, Linux kernel 3.18 has been implemented, along with Plasma Desktop 5.2 and KDE Frameworks 5.7 Beta.
More details about this release can be found in the announcement. You can download Manjaro KDE 0.9.0 Pre1 right now from Softpedia. Keep in mind that this is still under heavy development and it's not a stable system.
