Manjaro 21.1 Pahvo Release is near

Announcements Releases
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We added automatic backups on any package upgrade action when you use BTRFS as your filesystem. Get our latest Release Candidate now!

Since we released Ornara earlier this year all our developer teams worked hard to get the next release of Manjaro out there. We call it Pahvo.

This release features major improvements to Calamares, including filesystem selection for automatic partitioning and enhanced support for btrfs. For btrfs installations, the default subvolume layout has been improved for easier rollbacks and less wasted space on snapshots. Additionally, swapfiles on btrfs filesystem are now supported.

The Gnome edition has received a major rework the update to Gnome 40. The default layout has been redesigned to follow more closely upstream defaults, with some adjustments to reduce the pointer travel for users who prefer using mouse with gnome.

For users that preferred the old vertical desktop layout, we have the Manjaro legacy layout, which mimics the previous gnome defaults. We made sure that all the layouts shipped with gnome-layout-switcher still work after the transition to Gnome 40.

Firefox now comes with the gnome-desktop style theme enabled by default for more consistent look with the desktop, but this can be toggled with one click from gnome-layout-switcher for users preferring the native Firefox look.

The Plasma edition comes with the latest Plasma 5.22 series, Frameworks 5.84 and Applications (Gear) 21.04. We also updated our default theme to match more upstream Breeze theming. This includes also a new wallpaper.

Plasma has become more pleasurable to use through improvements to the design and greater smoothness and consistency in transparencies, blurs, icons, and animations. Moving things to accessible locations, offering hints and visual cues, and creating new settings allows you to customize your work environment to make it fit perfectly to your needs. Following the true KDE spirit, the push for a more stable and attractive desktop does not mean you have to renounce control over how you want it to look or behave. Plasma 5.22, as always, packs all the flexibility and tools for customization you have come to expect and love, and some more to boot.

Meanwhile, the push to move Plasma in its entirety to Wayland (the display protocol of the future) continues in full swing. By using Wayland behind the scenes, Plasma is able to include features and bug fixes not possible to implement on X11, offering you a better experience and more stability.

With our XFCE edition, we have now Xfce 4.16. The window manager received lots of updates and improvements again in the area of compositing and GLX. Support for fractional scaling was added to the display dialog, along with highlighting the preferred mode of a display with an asterisk and adding aspect ratios next to resolutions. The settings manager has improved search and filter capabilities. Thunar file manager received a boatload of fixes and quite a few notable features, including pause for copy/move operations, support for queued file transfer, remembering view settings per directory and support for transparency in Gtk themes.

Kernel 5.13 is used for this release, such as the latest drivers available to date. With 5.4 LTS-Kernel minimal-ISOs we offer additional support for older hardware.

We hope you enjoy this release and let us know what you think of Pahvo so far …

27 Likes
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What is uses for the automatic backups (i assume snapshots?)? Snap-Pac?

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It seems that the RC ISOs can only be burned in DD mode and not ISO mode. Is it a bug or a feature? I remember 21.0 ISOs can only be burned in ISO mode.

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10 posts were split to a new topic: Manjaro Architect on Pahvo

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Why are you so blatantly anti-XFS, Manjaro?

manjaro-anti-xfs
manjaro-anti-xfs800Ă—600 56.7 KB

Today is the day I make my official announcement that I will be forking the entire Manjaro project as “Xanjaro”, where the only supported file-system is XFS. Join me, everyone, and we shall dominate the entire Linux ecosystem. :muscle: TO WWWWWWWWWWWWAR! :rage:

(Or I can just give Btrfs a try for the root file-system, or try again with manjaro-architect to use XFS.)

Hey, I know I waged war on you or whatever. But aside from that, is it too late to request that XFS is added to the list of file-systems for automatic partitioning? It performs beautifully on SSD, and some would argue even better than F2FS overall. Quite mature and stable, that even Red Hat uses it as their default file-system. It would fit nicely in the list: ext4, btrfs, xfs, f2fs

Sorry about the whole forking-your-entire-project and waging war stuff. :worried:

UPDATE: Success! :partying_face: Please see the following forum thread and Calamares ticket:

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I’m really happy to see btrfs with @ subvolumes and snapshot features coming to Manjaro. This will make system backup rolling back much faster, smaller and easier backups and is something I’ve been waiting for. The support for swapfile is icing on the cake! Thanks Manjaro team! :clap:

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It uses Timeshift by default and therefore uses timeshift-autosnap (Marko Gobin / timeshift-autosnap · GitLab) as a pacman hook and grub-btrfs (GitHub - Antynea/grub-btrfs: Include btrfs snapshots at boot options. (Grub menu)) to update the Grub boot menu if I’m not mistaken.

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Is there any chance that an easy “how-to” could be released for converting existing EXT4 installs to BTRFS + easy rollback configuration ? I can’t figure out if the filesystem conversion is trivial or not.

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I guess it can be a good start
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Btrfs#Ext3/4_to_Btrfs_conversion

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I’ve added some of FS when was working on this feature just to test the code. Apparently my list is leaved as is. @philm I think we can revisit a list of filesystems to choose from.

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I highly implore you add “xfs” to this list. :slight_smile:

The installation and post-installation experience was exactly identical when choosing xfs, as it was when choosing ext4. In other words, the experience was equally smooth and predictable, even post-install. The only difference is the result: a system partition that uses XFS, instead of Ext4 (LUKS or no LUKS also yields the same exact experience.)

XFS leverages the performance and features of newer hardware and SSDs, which is great for newer installations as well. I know I would be ostracized if I said that XFS should be the default selection over Ext4 (which I consider it the better default, personally), but I don’t think other people see any issue in adding it as an option in the drop-down list, especially since f2fs made it in the list. :wink:

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I personally see it like this:

  • ext4
  • xfs
  • btrfs
  • f2fs
  • zfs
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I agree with that list, except for “zfs”, due to the licensing issues and current controversies with regards to Linus Torvalds, Greg K.H., and other mainline kernel developers that voiced their concerns over merging ZFS into kernel development.

As it stands now, ZFS should be left up to advanced users to manually do on their own accord, as it should not be presented as a standard selection. Ext4, XFS, Btrfs, F2FS are all safe and reliable options. ZFS as a Linux system partition? I cannot comfortably say the same thing.

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Manjaro provides ZFS kernel module by default so I think for Manjaro it should be ok.

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I’ll defer to you on that matter. I love ZFS, but I just feel tentative to recommend it to novice users or those installing Manjaro to a new system for the first time.

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Digression, I’ll see one day if I’d see some benefit for my potato PC to switch to xfs or f2fs.

I’m total newb concerning file systems. I know about btrfs, but the others, nix.

For those who know, a large fs selection is nice, but ext4 should stay by default for the uninitiated. And I believe it won’t change anytime soon in Manjaro.

Maybe one day an explicative pop-up for each filesystem in Calamares, or a comparative article in the forum. But Arch/Manjaro wikis seem more the place for this maybe.

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Since I had to do a fresh install on a machine today, I took the RC 21.1 KDE and tried it once with xfs on the system SSD. It seemed to go so far everything first clear, however, I had a vertical green line in the terminal, which also, no matter what I set, did not disappear. Unfortunately I didn’t take a screenshot because the buddy who owns this machine was immediately put off by it and wanted to go back to ext4. It is the KDE console, default theme Breath2, no matter with or without transparency. Graphics card AMD, driver amdgpu. Noticeable immediately after fresh install with xfs.

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That sounds like a scaling, KDE/Plasma, video, X11/Wayland, and/or Konsole issue. Why would the underlying filesystem manifest very specific display glitches on KDE’s Konsole app? Applications are loaded into memory. It’s kind of like troubleshooting subtitles not displaying properly on VLC media player. No one would begin troubleshooting by addressing the filesystem: they would look at VLC’s settings, video card/driver, font settings, DM/desktop settings, compositor, etc.

Not trying to sound rude, but just wanted to further clear that up. For all intents and purposes, it could have been a one-off coincidence.

EDIT: There’s been some developments to Plasma, KDE Frameworks, and theming that ship with this 21.1 RC.

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Sorry, I didn’t consciously associate that with the file system. But it is now certain that it occurred for the first time when I rebooted the computer with freshly installed xfs. Scaling exactly as before with ext4 and then later again ext4. correlations? Certainly not. It will probably not have been due to the RC 21.1(at least I hope).

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@winnie: I installed my own machine tonight still with the RC 21.1 KDE and xfs. Also AMD graphics & amdgpu. On the 1st try I too had this vertical green line in the console. At the subsequent 2nd attempt everything went well, no glitch. I agree with you, it CAN’T be the filesystem, but it’s still curious.

Cheers :beers: