Manjaro 23.0 ‘Uranos’ USB

Manjaro 23.0 ‘Uranos’ on USB

Since we released Talos in April 2023 we worked hard to get the next release of Manjaro out there. We call it Uranos.

The GNOME edition has received several updates to Gnome 44 series. This includes a lot of fixes and polish when Gnome 44 18 originally was released in March 2023. You can find the changes made to each point-release here: 44.1 6, 44.2 2, 44.3 2, 44.4 23.

Highlights of 44 release series is:

GNOME’s file chooser dialogs have only ever had a list view, which is great when you want to pick a file based on its name, but isn’t so good when picking files based on their thumbnails. Over the years, GNOME users have therefore repeatedly requested that a grid view be added to the file chooser. This has been one of the most positively received changes in our history, so we are confident that people will like it added in this release cycle!

GNOME’s accessibility settings have been redesigned for GNOME 44. The different sections of settings are now split up, to make them easier to navigate. The design of individual settings has also been improved, to be clearer and more consistent with the rest of settings. Additionally, many settings have had descriptions added. Mouse and Touchpad settings have been reworked for GNOME 44. The most noticeable change is the addition of videos which demonstrate the different available options. Not only do these look great, but they also make the various settings easier to understand.

Lastly, Software in GNOME 44 offers a smoother and faster experience. The pages for each software category are now displayed more quickly, so you can browse with less interruption. Reloading of pages has also been reduced.

The Plasma edition comes with the latest Plasma 5.27 LTS series 32 and KDE Gear 23.08 29. It brings exciting new improvements to your desktop.

This release includes a window tiling system, a more stylish app theme, cleaner and more usable tools, and widgets that give you more control over your machine. KDE’s designers have been hard at work reducing the number of pages in Plasma’s System Settings utility and moving smaller options in with other settings. Such is the case of the configuration for the animation when apps are launching, which now lives on the Cursors page. Additionally, the Highlight Changed Settings button has been moved to the hamburger menu for a cleaner look.

Migrating Plasma to the new Wayland display server technology has been no mean feat. But despite how hard the work has been, it is paying off, as Wayland opens many new ways to interact with your desktop. Plasma 5.27’s Wayland support is better than ever, with many bug fixes and reliability improvements throughout!

Dolphin 23.08 tweaks what it shows and how it shows it to give you a better idea of what you are looking at and what you can do with it. Dolphin hides temporary and backup files, uncluttering your view and stopping you from accidentally tampering with them. Other smaller details, like showing the progress of the calculation of the size of an item as it is happening, and the information of a selected file in the information panel (instead of showing the information of every file the cursor rolls over) help you get a clearer idea of what is going on in each moment.

We renamed Kalendar to Merkuro since the application not only lets you manage your events and tasks any more, but also your contacts. Skanpage, KDE’s scanning utility, now lets you re-order multi-page scans using drag-and-drop, and offers more adjustment options, like brightness, contrast, gamma, and color balance.

Itinerary is KDE’s travel assistant. Apart from reading and importing data from confirmation emails and SMS sent by airline companies, Itinerary can now import online railway tickets using the booking reference and passenger name, and grab booking details directly from the operator’s website. Note that this is currently only available for Deutsche Bahn and SNCF.

With our XFCE edition, we have now Xfce 4.18. Here some highlights: A new file highlighting feature (accessed from the file properties dialog) in Thunar file manager lets you set a custom colour background and a custom foreground text colour – an effective way to call attention to specific file(s) in a directory laden with similar-looking mime types. On the subject of finding files, Thunar includes recursive search.

The panel picks up a pair of new preferences. First, panel length is now configured in pixels rather than percentages, as before. Second, there’s a new “keep panel above windows” option. This allows maximised app windows to fill the area behind the panel rather than maximise its bottom or top edge to sit flush against it.

Control Centre groups all of the desktop’s various modules for managing the system into one easy-to-use window. New options are present in many of these. For example you can disable header bars in dialogs from the Appearance module; show or hide a ‘delete’ option in file context menus from Desktop; and pick a default multi-monitor behaviour before you attach an additional screen – dead handy, that.

Kernel 6.5 is used for this release, such as the latest drivers available to date. With 6.1 LTS and 5.15 LTS we offer additional support for older hardware as needed.