A new installer has been implemented in the OS

Jan 19, 2015 15:12 GMT  ·  By

Manjaro Xfce 0.9.0 Pre1, a Linux distribution based on well-tested snapshots of the Arch Linux repositories and 100% compatible with Arch, is now ready for testing and download.

The Manjaro developers have announced a while ago that they were working on the next version in the series, although it looks like they are not ready to take the big step towards the dreaded version 1.0. The latest stable version is now 0.8.11 and the one after that was 0.8.10, so we can consider this to be an evolution.

The default desktop environment used in Manjaro, by the official team, is Xfce. There are a lot of other flavors, but those are built by the community. Users know what to expect when they hear about Xfce and they are mostly right. It will be light and with a simple launcher, but the makers of the distribution also put a lot of effort into customization, so this will not be your average Xfce experience.

Latest Manjaro gets a fancy new installer

Even if this is a new version and you would expect to see all kinds on new features, the bulk of the announcement is about the new installer. What's so great about the installer, you might ask. It's actually one of the projects out there that involved developers from different projects and operating systems. It will eventually be used by many distros, so this is the perfect example of open source collaboration.

"The new, Qt5/python3 based installer is a joint effort of several distributions. In May 2014, developers of Netrunnner, KaOS and Manjaro got together to discuss the possibility to work jointly on a brand new, Qt5 based installer. The idea was born to create Calamares. By June the coding started and by September a first, raw usable version was put into testing for XFCE based ISOs. Currently, Calamares is being developed with contributions from BBQLinux, Fedora, KaOS, Kubuntu, Manjaro, Maui and Netrunner," reads the official announcement.

The developers also explain that the package manager Pacman will advance to version 4.2, Xfce 4.11 is now used by default, and the Linux kernel has been upgraded to 3.18.

More details about this release can be found in the official announcement. You can download Manjaro Xfce 0.9.0 Pre1 right now from Softpedia.