They didn't give it to me for my birthday, but almost. Today, February 5, have thrown manjaro 2022-02-05, which, if my accounts do not fail me, is the third stable version of this 2022. If in the headline I have mentioned that it arrives with fresh packages, it is for at least two: LibreOffice 7.3 and KDE Gear 21.02.2, both released just two days ago. For the most popular free office suite other than MS Office, it's a major update, but KDE app updates are for bug fixes.
As always with every new stable release, Manjaro 2022-02-05 arrives with updated kernels, but this time there is no new series. They have taken the opportunity to recall that Linux 4.4 has reached the end of its life cycle, and Linux 5.14 has been removed from the repositories. Users who are on one of those two versions will need to upgrade to a supported version, such as Linux 5.10, 5.15, or 5.16. Those who are in 4.4 and do not want to make such a big jump, should know that 4.9, 4.14, 4.19 and 5.4 are still supported, all of them LTS.
Highlights of Manjaro 2022-02-05
- Some of the kernels have been updated, including BTRFS regression fixes. Here we are reminded that the 4.4 series is now marked as EOL. Also linux514 was removed from the Manjaro repositories.
- linux-firmware remained split, however it is still available uncompressed to continue to support 4.x kernels.
- KDE Gear has been updated to 21.12.2.
- LibreOffice is now at 7.3.
- Nvidia released their first stable version of the 510 driver series: 510.47.03.
- Updated Calamari to 3.2.51.
- Mesa is now at 21.3.5.
- Wine has been revamped to 7.1.
- OpenSearch is at 1.2.4,
- VirtualBox has been updated to 6.1.32.
- Systemd is now at 250.3.
- Firefox has been updated to 96.0.2.
- AMDVLK is in 22.Q1.1.
- PipeWire has been updated to version 0.3.45 to fix audio issues with Zoom and other communication apps.
- Regular updates to Python and Haskell.
manjaro 2022-02-05 has been announced a few minutes ago, so it should already be available to update from Pacman (sudo pacman -Syu) or from Pamac. As for the ISO, last it's still that of Manjaro 21.2.2