This morning, in the different groups of Manjaro we were waiting for new packages, more specifically those of manjaro 21.0.1 Ornara. They arrived a couple of hours ago, and a few moments ago they opened a thread on your forum announcing the new version officially. Although there are changes in all its editions, the most striking have reached the one that uses the GNOME desktop, since they have already updated the applications to those of GNOME 40.
GNOME is a desktop, which means that applications are only part of it. What is the graphical environment has not been updated yet to GNOME 40, and is that, although Manjaro updates its packages soon, its development model is known as semi-Rolling Release: an installation and updates for life, but they are a bit conservative and avoid doing crazy things.
Highlights of Manjaro 21.0.1
- GNOME 40 applications, but shell and extensions remain at 3.38.
- Systemd switches to v247.0.
- They have updated the kernels, but to more up-to-date point versions, as Linux 5.12 is still in development.
- pirewire, WINE and AMDVLK updated.
- Table uploaded to v21.0.1.
- Updates to many packages, such as python and hashkell.
As a comment, Plasma 5.21.4 has not appeared yet, since it was launched last Tuesday and Manjaro usually waits at least a week to offer it as an update. They also haven't updated the XFCE version.
manjaro 21.0.1 has already reached existing users. The new images are for scratch installations, and are available at this link in their official editions, which are XFCE, GNOME and KDE. In the next few days they should also update at least some of the community versions, which are the MATE, Awesome, Bspwm, Budgie, Cinnamon, i3, LXDE, LXQt, OpenBox editions, and even a XFCE-USB which does not appear on the official website.
not sure when they will update the shell?