14 DAY TRIAL // Manjaro Xfce 0.8.10 RC1, a Linux distribution based on well-tested snapshots of the Arch Linux repositories and 100% compatible with Arch, has been released and is now ready for testing.
Manjaro has slowly become one of the best Arch-based distributions, and the Xfce flavor is powering on with the first Release Candidate in the new 0.8.10 series. This is not the first flavor that gets a release in this new branch, but it's one of the most popular.
Despite what users might think, most of the Manjaro flavors are actually developed by the community and not by a central team. In fact, the Manjaro ecosystem is so large that it would be very difficult for just one team to take care of all the versions. Xfce, on the other hand, is an official one, so it might seem a little bit more polished than the others.
“Today we ship also our release candidates of our official install medias. We start with our XFCE Edition. Rudy updated our default theme Menda once more. Gnome3 icons and checkboxes got optimized. Thus got new slides thanks to Joshua.”
“He also modified our welcome screen. A complete rework finalised our new look, we wanted to have for this new release. This screen will help you to get with Manjaro started. We offer links to our project pages, the forum, the wiki and even to our git-repositories,” said the developers on their blog.
A number of other packages have also been improved. For example, Thus, the graphical installer used by this distribution, has been updated and users now have access to full disk encryption.
Also, the plymouth package has been updated as well and a new theme has been created for it to match the look of the distribution. According to the devs, the install media is based on the stable branch. Users have been asked to download the new version of Manjaro, test it, and report anything that needs fixing.
This is just the first update and it's likely that more will follow. After all the official flavors are out, users should start seeing the community editions soon.
More details about this release can be found in the official announcement. You can download Manjaro Xfce 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.