This week, Manjaro announced that will become a company, among other things to be able to offer the same support that other companies such as Canonical or Red Hat offer. That has been the reason why the image that heads this article has led me to confusion: at first, I thought they were going to announce a version of their system for tablets, but no. What they have announced is manjaro 18.1.0, codenamed Juhraya.
Philip Müller says that Juhraya It offers numerous enhancements that have been included during the last six months of work, and it is especially noticeable in office applications. In the past it was ensured that Manjaro would replace LibreOffice with FreeOffice as the default office suite, but Manjaro 18.1.0 will allow us to choose FreeOffice (free) from SoftMaker, LibreOffice from The Document Foundation or not install either.
Manjaro 18.1.0 will allow us to choose the office suite
It seems clear that one of the first issues that Manjaro will address when becoming a company will be its agreement or sponsorship with SoftMaker, since in the blog post of the Juhraya launch place a lot of emphasis on the benefits of FreeOffice. Among them, we have that it is much more compatible with Microsoft Office and that its latest version includes support for formats of LibreOffice like the ODT. Whether or not they have an agreement with SoftMaker, the good thing is that they will allow us to choose what we prefer during the installation of the operating system.
On the other hand, we have the (non-existent) fight between the next-gen packages: Flatpak and Snap. Distributions like Ubuntu only include factory support with the Canonical (Snap) option, having to add the other manually if we want to install Flatpak version software. Manjaro 18.1.0 will introduce a new graphical package management tool, initially called "fpakman" and eventually called "bauh". With «bauh» we can manage Flatpak and Snap packages.
Better desktop integration
Manjaro 18.1.0 will be available on the same desktops as previous versions. Both the Xfce option, like KDE and GNOME have been significantly improved in this release, including features designed to make the system and the desktop work in perfect harmony. To achieve this, components such as the new "Matcha" theme for the Xfce version (4.14), the new KDE notification system (Plasma 5.16) and new buttons have been introduced in the GNOME version (3.32).
Those interested, you can download the new version of Manjaro from here.