Best source for Manjaro news?

[retired]

I have News – Manjaro as my homepage but I saw that the news topics are from last year.
What do you use for Manjaro news?

[soundofthunder]

Depending upon what kind of news you’re after, the Update Announcements are worthwhile monitoring.

Announcements

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Additionally, you can add .rss to the end of topic URLs to create a feed source that can be added to most News/Feed applications. Try it.

Some examples from another topic.

[Aragorn]

Welcome to the forum!

@retired

What do you use for Manjaro news?

Truth be told, you’ll always get the most recent news here on the forum, and specifically, from the Announcements category — that’s a clickable link, by the way.

As a new member, you may especially want to subscribe to notifications for the Stable Updates category — or Testing Updates, or Unstable Updates, depending on what branch you’re on. Every bundled update, whether it’s for Manjaro Testing or Manjaro Stable, always comes accompanied by a dedicated announcement thread.

• The first post of the thread contains the changes with regard to the previous bundled update.

• The second post of the thread details the potential problems, and how to deal with them.

• The announcement thread also always contains a poll (in the first post), and a summary of past issues (in the second post), for those who’ve skipped an update — which is not advised with a rolling-release distribution, but it does happen.

[6x12]

Bookmark https://forum.manjaro.org/latest, log in and check regularly and you’ll be informed of all updates, issues and news.

To get instantly notified of every update log in, go to ‘Categories’ >> ‘Announcements’, pick your branch, eg ‘Stable Updates’, hit the bell icon top right and pick ‘Watching first Post’.

This enables users on low/expensive data volume networks to deactivate pamac’s update checker (30Mb every 6h) and save around 5Gb a month.

[triam]

I’ve just created a simple script that is launched by my backup script. It opens an announcement page when there are update news. It can also be launched from systemd or cron.

#!/bin/zsh
RSS="https://forum.manjaro.org/c/announcements/testing-updates/13.rss" 
#RSS="https://forum.manjaro.org/c/announcements/stable-updates/12.rss" 
FILE="$HOME/.cache/last_link_update.txt"
LINK=$(curl -s "$RSS" | sed -n 's:.*<link>\(.*\)</link>.*:\1:p' | sed -n '2p')
[[ -f "$FILE" && "$LINK" == "$(cat $FILE)" ]] && exit 0
XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=/run/user/$(id -u) notify-send -i face-smile "Updates News!"
xdg-open "$LINK" >/dev/null 2>&1 &!
echo "$LINK" > "$FILE"

Edit: added missing line.

[Kielcelaria]

@triam I hope you don’t mind, but I tested your script and it doesn’t actually write the last_link_update.txt so it always opens the page when run. It also allowed for curl errors to load the browser. The updated script, with error checking, is below.

#!/bin/zsh

# Define the source RSS feed and the cache file location
RSS="https://forum.manjaro.org/c/announcements/testing-updates/13.rss"
FILE="$HOME/.cache/last_link_update.txt"

# Ensure the cache directory exists
mkdir -p "$(dirname "$FILE")"

# Fetch the latest link from the RSS feed
# The first <link> is to the category, the second is the latest post.
LINK=$(curl -s "$RSS" | sed -n 's:.*<link>\(.*\)</link>.*:\1:p' | sed -n '2p')

# 1. Exit if the LINK variable is empty (e.g., curl failed)
[[ -z "$LINK" ]] && exit 1

# 2. Exit if the cache file exists and its content matches the latest link
[[ -f "$FILE" && "$LINK" == "$(cat "$FILE")" ]] && exit 0

# If the script continues, the link is new. Send a notification and open it.
XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=/run/user/$(id -u) notify-send -i face-smile "Manjaro Updates!" "New testing update posted."
xdg-open "$LINK" &> /dev/null &

# 3. Save the new link to the cache file for the next check
echo "$LINK" > "$FILE"

exit 0

[triam]

My bad. What I posted was only a part of the whole solution, and I missed one line. Thanks

[Kielcelaria]

BTW, if you replace face-smile with manjaro you will get the Manjaro logo in the notification.

[Ben]

When updates come, the Announcement thread. Otherwise from recent posts in the forum - everything shows up here.

[retired]

Thank you all! I got the information I wanted. I will now also use that script.

[Kielcelaria]

I have been having some fun and modified the script to take a variable of (stable/testing/unstable) to select which announcement it looks for so I can run it on multiple machines with systemd. If no variable added then it defaults to stable. In case anyone is curious, here it is:

#!/bin/zsh

# 1. Set the branch based on the first command-line argument ($1)
# The asterisk (*) is a wildcard that acts as the default case.
case $1 in
  testing)
    BRANCH="testing"
    RSS="https://forum.manjaro.org/c/announcements/testing-updates/13.rss"
    ;;
  unstable)
    BRANCH="unstable"
    RSS="https://forum.manjaro.org/c/announcements/unstable-updates/15.rss"
    ;;
  *) # Default to stable if the argument is "stable", empty, or anything else
    BRANCH="stable"
    RSS="https://forum.manjaro.org/c/announcements/stable-updates/12.rss"
    ;;
esac

FILE="$HOME/.cache/last_link_update_${BRANCH}.txt"

# Ensure the cache directory exists
mkdir -p "$(dirname "$FILE")"

# Fetch the latest link from the RSS feed
LINK=$(curl -s "$RSS" | sed -n 's:.*<link>\(.*\)</link>.*:\1:p' | sed -n '2p')

# Exit if the LINK variable is empty (e.g., curl failed)
[[ -z "$LINK" ]] && exit 1

# Exit if the cache file exists and its content matches the latest link
[[ -f "$FILE" && "$LINK" == "$(cat "$FILE")" ]] && exit 0

# 2. Make the notification body dynamic using the $BRANCH variable
NOTIFY_BODY=$(echo "$LINK" | sed -E "s|.*/t/(.*)/[0-9]+$|\1|; s/^${BRANCH}-update-//i; s/([a-zA-Z])-([a-zA-Z])/\1 \2/g; s/([a-zA-Z])-([0-9])/\1 \2/g; s/([0-9])-([a-zA-Z])/\1 \2/g")

# 3. Make the notification title dynamic. ${BRANCH:u} capitalizes the first letter.
NOTIFY_TITLE="Manjaro ${BRANCH:u} Update!"

# Send the notification with the hint to make it persistent
XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=/run/user/$(id -u) notify-send -i manjaro -h boolean:transient:false "$NOTIFY_TITLE" "$NOTIFY_BODY"

# Open the link in the background
xdg-open "$LINK" &> /dev/null &

# Save the new link to the cache file for the next check
echo "$LINK" > "$FILE"

exit 0

[triam]

@Kielcelaria
The script is pasted twice.

[Kielcelaria]

Thanks and fixed.