A first release preview of Manjaro 25.0 Zetar is available for testing. The stable installer ISOs are anticipated to be released in mid-March, with Plasma 6.3, GNOME 48, and XFCE 4.20. 

Manjaro 25.0 Zetar Release Review

Beginning of February after Lunar New Years we started our developement cycle of Manjaro 25.0 we code-named Zetar. Most likely the stable installer ISOs will be available in Mid-March featuring  Plasma 6.3 ,  GNOME 48 and  XFCE 4.20 .

So far we released already two preview releases. Another might come end next week (CW9), to align with  Plasma 6 release schedule. For GNOME mid March (CW13) based on their  release schedule.

In this topic we will discuss and reveal the changes we intend to do within this development cycle. And this time the stable branch is going along with it. So what does this mean? Most people avoid to use testing and unstable branches, therefore we get most of our needed feedback from the stable branch users. So more users, more feedback.

The distro itself is still tested as best as we could within our development team, however we have not all the configurations of hardware on our end you might use.

So issuing pacman -Q manjaro-release might reveal your current release you are on. Example: manjaro-release 25.0.0preview-1. When you however call some like lsb_release -r you will get a result like Release: 25.0.0. We chose that to not confuse people and post threads about, why I’m now on an unstable or preview release. Our numbering is only for our installation medias.

So the two current available ISOs shipped  XFCE 4.20 . Most users won’t even notice big changes with it. Next week we will focus on  Plasma 6.3.

Another thing we will change is to change from  ext4 to  btrfs  as the default file system. We already shipped support for btrfs in older releases. We also added automatic snapshots on btrfs with bootloader entries for these when btrfs was chosen by the user. Since our testing are all fine, why not make it now the defacto default. People can still change to ext4 or xfs in our auto-partitioning option or even format and structure their partition layout complete freely in the advanced mode of Calamares, the graphical installer we use.

So feel free to give us early feedback during this development cycle of Manjaro 25.0.

Highlights of 46 release series are:

XFCE 42.0

• Release 202502171051 · manjaro/release-review · GitHub 
• Release 202502040706 · manjaro/release-review · GitHub 

Plasma 6.3

• expected CW9

Gnome 48

• expected CW13

Manjaro 25.0 Zetar Release Review