Manjaro 25.0 'Zetar' Joins Fedora and Ubuntu Release Party

Manjaro is undoubtedly one of the most user-friendly, Arch-based Linux distributions around. With its rolling release model, Manjaro caters to a wide range of users, delivering a reliable yet bleeding-edge experience.

Its developers have recently introduced a fresh ISO release that gives new users an up-to-date system right away, eliminating the need to manually download and install updates after installation.

Interestingly, it comes the same week when we have two big releases in the form of Fedora 42 and Ubuntu 25.04.

🆕 Manjaro 25.0 Zetar: What's New?

This release of Manjaro comes packed with many improvements that are mostly focused on the foundational aspects of the distro.

Some key highlights include:

• Linux Kernel 6.12
• Updated Desktop Environments
• Manjaro Summit Public Alpha

Linux Kernel 6.12

Taking advantage of Linux kernel 6.12, Manjaro 25.0 now enables Intel Xe2 and Battlemage GPU by default, with better support for laptops manufactured by ASUS, Lenovo, and Dell.

Similarly, there is the PREEMPT_RT implementation, which should result in better response times and faster performance for users of the X86, ARM64, and RISC-V CPU architectures.

We have talked more about this kernel release in our coverage of it.

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Newer Desktop Environments

For Manjaro Xfce, there is now Xfce 4.20, which brings about refinements like an upgraded Thunar file manager that allows users to set a custom background and foreground text color for files, supports multiple power profiles, and has improved panel customization.

In the case of Manjaro GNOME, we get the latest GNOME 48, which introduces a new Wellbeing feature, stacked notifications, battery charge limiting for laptops, better flatpak handling, support for dynamic triple buffering, and initial HDR support.

As for Manjaro KDE Plasma, the April bugfix release, KDE Plasma 6.3.4 is included, which features improvements like overhauled fractional scaling, better UI element snapping, more accurate colors when using Night Light, and an improved System Monitor.

Manjaro Summit Public Alpha

While this is not part of the Manjaro 25.0 Zetar release, the announcement for this went out just before the new release announcement went out. So, Manjaro Summit is the new name for Manjaro Immutable, which has been released as a public alpha for testing purposes.

The developers call it a "semi-immutable" distro with an atomic update system that downloads and deploys entire disk images during updates, making the root filesystem read-only while selectively migrating parts of the system.

This enables easy rollbacks in case of issues and is said to offer greater protection against user/software error while also providing some limited protection against malware.

📥 Get Manjaro 25.0 Zetar

For existing users, they can run the following command to get the upgrade:

sudo pacman -Syu

For fresh installations, desktop images for the various editions of Manjaro 25.0 can be downloaded from the official website. If you prefer the minimal image, then click on "More" and toggle the switch to "Minimal" to get the ISO via Torrent or Direct Download.

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