14 DAY TRIAL // The second preview version of Manjaro Xfce 0.8.11, a Linux distribution based on well-tested snapshots of the Arch Linux repositories and 100% compatible with Arch, is now out and it even features more improvements than the first release.
This new Manjaro development cycle is moving very fast, but the reason for that speed is the fact that the developers chose a small upgrade and not a big one, as everyone was expecting. Users have been waiting for Manjaro 0.9 or maybe 1.0, but the community will have to settle with 0.8.10. It may not be as exciting, but it's still a step in the right direction.
“We present to you our first preview of Manjaro XFCE Minimal Edition. We updated our kernel to Linux 3.14 LTS and use the latest MESA release with latest free and proprietary drivers. Also you find our latest graphical tools we develop to get Manjaro easier to be managed with a few mouse clicks. Also we worked on pamac. We added our development version of our popular graphical package manager to find issues we might have not found yet.”
“With Manjaro Settings Manager 0.2.0 we offer you an enhanced kernel and graphic driver management experience. We will notify you about newer drivers and kernels, tell you when you run an unsupported kernel or new language packages are available. Other nice and needful user interfaces will come to our settings manager soon,” reads the official Manjaro blog.
The switch to Linux kernel 3.14 is a welcomed one, especially now that it is an LTS branch. As you all well know, the Manjaro distribution comes with numerous kernels in its repositories, so it's very likely that the upcoming Linux kernel 3.16 will also be available very soon for all users.
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.
Everyone is looking out for the Xfce flavor of Manjaro and it's one of the lightest available. Manjaro comes with a huge number of flavors covering almost all of the major desktop environments and window managers.
More details about this release can be found in the official announcement. You can download Manjaro Xfce 0.8.11 Preview 1 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.