14 DAY TRIAL // Philip Müller, the lead developer and creator of the Manjaro Linux project, had the pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download of the first Release Candidate build of the upcoming Manjaro Linux Xfce 15.09 distribution.
Powered by Linux kernel 4.1 LTS and built around the lightweight Xfce 4.12 desktop environment, Manjaro Linux Xfce 15.09 Release Candidate 1 adds improvements to the Thus graphical installer, as well as to the command-line installer tool, to ensure the deployment of the distribution on a wide range of computers, and, as an alternative, the developers added the next-gen Calamares graphical installer.
On the design front, we can notice that the Menda desktop themes for Xfce have been rebased on the superb Vertex theme, but have been optimized for the Manjaro Linux style. A set of Numix-based icons and a Breeze-based cursor theme were added as well in this development release of Manjaro Linux Xfce. Also, all the Manjaro tools received various improvements and bugfixes.
"The Xfce edition remains our flagship offering and has received the attention it deserves. Few can claim to offer such a polished, integrated and leading-edge Xfce experience," says Philip Müller. "We mainly focused on polishing the user experience on the desktop and window manager, and on updating some components to take advantage of newly available technologies."
The Manjaro Settings Manager received improvements
The first Release Candidate build of Manjaro Linux Xfce 15.09 adds multiple improvements to the Manjaro Settings Manager utility, which now offers an easy-to-use graphical user interface, making it a breeze to install or remove the Linux kernel branches supported by the operating system. Additionally, Manjaro Settings Manager now lets users adjust the system's date and time settings.
Furthermore, Manjaro Linux's graphical package management tools have been greatly improved, including optional AUR support in Pamac 2.4.1, the ability to choose between the systemd and OpenRC init systems, and the addition of two launchers for the Steam for Linux client, one that uses Steam's compatibility libraries, and another one that uses Manjaro's native libraries, in order to support as many games as possible.
Those of you eager to get a sneak peek at the latest and greatest changes primed for Manjaro Linux's flagship edition can download the Manjaro Linux Xfce 15.09 Release Candidate 1 Live DVD ISO images for 64-bit and 32-bit architectures right now from Softpedia. However, please try to keep in mind that this is a pre-release version and is not suitable for deployment on production machines where stability is of the essence.