It had been long overdue, and now it is here. A few hours ago, Phil announced the launch of manjaro 22.0, which goes by the code name Sikaris. As with Arch Linux and other distros like Garuda or EndeavourOS, what's driving this news is a new ISO whose news has already reached existing users in the form of single updates or, more commonly, much larger stable versions.
What stands out in the release note they are the desktops, the latest versions of GNOME 43, Xfce 4.18 and Plasma, as well as the kernel. sikaris uses Linux 6.1, but there are also "minimal" ISOs with Linux 5.10 and Linux 5.15, the last two LTS versions of the kernel. Whatever is chosen, Manjaro makes available to its users a graphical tool to install any of its kernels, among which there are real-time (rt) kernels and there will be Release Candidates again when development of Linux 6.2 begins.
Manjaro 22.0 arrives with new wallpaper
Although they had announced it a long time ago, today they have finally uploaded it to the stable version repositories. The wallpaper that Sikaris premieres is called North (north), and it follows the line of the wallpaper that was used in previous versions. It is in light and dark versions, and it will change depending on the theme that we have chosen.
Regarding the novelties that this new ISO, in addition to the latest (or almost) versions of GNOME, Xfce and Plasma, we have updated packages, such as Firefox 108.0.1, Pamac 10.4.3-2 or VLC 3.0.18. From the official repositories we can install software such as Thunderbird 102.6.1-1, LibreOffice 7.4.3 (if the "fresh" branch is chosen) or Audacity 3.2.2. Some recent issues have also been fixed, such as the one with pacman-mirrors that it was behaving erratically after uploading a package with the same name to AUR.
Interested users can download the new images from the link in the release note that we have provided at the beginning of this article.
Well, I don't know how they solved it, because as soon as I realized the source of the package I had to uninstall it and then reinstall the corresponding one within the Manjaro ecosystem, otherwise I would have been updated from the AUR, it wasn't the first time I've seen that some packages or rather, dependencies come to have the same names both in the official repositories (especially in community and extra) and in AUR, I don't know if it will be because there are programs or applications whose dependencies are not all officially supported and resort to AUR or if the Arch community wants to make life easier by adopting some Manjaro features in order to automate things.