Linux distribution Manjaro 26.0: "Anh-Linh" relies on Wayland

The popular Linux distribution Manjaro has been released in version 26.0 at the start of the year. The mandatory codename for the version is "Anh-Linh". The developers have focused on KDE Plasma and Gnome, and are defaulting to Wayland. Furthermore, support for Nvidia Pascal, Maxwell, and older GPUs is being dropped due to the Nvidia driver used.

In the Manjaro forum, the maintainers have announced the new version. They are updating various packages, and the desktop environments are also getting updated. KDE Plasma 6.5 and Gnome 49 also default to Wayland sessions. Those who need X11 support should opt for the build with the XFCE desktop environment. The Nvidia driver in version 590 no longer supports the aforementioned older GPUs; Turing-based GPUs or newer are required.

Old kernels have reached their end-of-life (EOL) – users of the 5.4 kernels should replace them with 5.10 LTS or 5.15 LTS; those affected by 6.17 should switch to 6.18 or 6.12 LTS. For licensing reasons, Manjaro is now replacing the fast database Redis with Valkey. The Mesa library is included in version 25.3.2, Firefox is at version 146.0.1, and LibreOffice is in version 25.8.4. The Cosmic Desktop 1.0.1 from Pop!_OS is also being introduced as an option in Manjaro. Both Budgie and Cinnamon have also been updated.

Current Downloads

On the Manjaro download page, the official flavors with KDE Plasma, Xfce, and Gnome desktop environments are available for download. The community-maintained images also include pre-installed desktops such as Cinnamon, i3 Window Manager, or Sway WM.

Manjaro is based on the rolling release Linux distribution Arch Linux​ and therefore always makes the latest software versions available. However, with an extremely user-friendly and simple interface. In mid-April of last year, Manjaro 25 with the codename "Zetar" was released. Back then, a major focus for the developers was also the updating of desktop environments.

(dmk)