14 DAY TRIAL // Manjaro developers have released a version of their distro powered by the latest KDE Plasma 5.4, which is still in development stages. The results are very interesting and offer a polished and very different desktop.
The latest KDE Plasma 5.4 release made quite an impact, and a few distros decided to integrate it, despite the fact that it's not ready. To be fair, they are not meant for regular use, but it shows a greater interest in the new desktop from KDE. In fact, the KDE developers have made quite a few changes and improvements, and it looks like they are on the right track.
On the other hand, Manjaro teams rarely integrate the stock version of a desktop environment, no matter the flavor, so you know you're going to get something interesting. For the KDE-Next edition of Manjaro, the devs didn't make and major modifications, but they are using a completely different, which is very flat, and the transitions and animations are quite nice.
Manjaro KDE-Next is more like a test
Users will notice that there are quite a lot of packages missing, but that's not really all that unusual. It's likely that many apps will be added at a later date when they will be fully compatible with the latest plasma or KDE Frameworks.
"Plasma brings many nice touches for our users such as much improved high DPI support, KRunner auto-completion and many new beautiful icons. It also lays the ground for the future with a tech preview of Wayland session available. We’re shipping a few new components such as an Audio Volume Plasma Widget, monitor calibration tool and the User Manager tool comes out beta. KRunner now remembers your previous searches and automatically completes from the history as you type. The Networks applet is now able to display network traffic graphs. It also supports two new VPN plugins for connecting over SSH or SSTP," reads the announcement made by the Manjaro team.
Also, the option of not installing a boot loader on MBR (legacy BIOS boot) systems has been added, the option of changing the file system type when editing a partition has been implemented, better partition detection and mounting/unmounting is now available, and a few other changes have been made.
You can download the latest build of Manjaro KDE-Next from Softpedia, but please keep in mind that it's not a stable release, and it shouldn't be used on productions machines.