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The Manjaro ARM team released today Manjaro ARM 21.02 as a major update to this official ARM port of the Manjaro Linux distribution for embedded and ARM devices.
Manjaro ARM 21.02 comes two months after Manjaro ARM 20.12 and ships with the latest Xfce 4.16 and KDE Plasma 5.21 desktop environments by default. The previous release shipped with Xfce 4.14 and KDE Plasma 5.20, but after an initial system update you’d get Xfce 4.16 and KDE Plasma 5.21.
If you’ve read my hands-on article of Manjaro ARM on the Raspberry Pi, you would know that the first thing I did was to update the system. I reviewed the Xfce edition, and Xfce 4.16 is a massive update that offers a huge performance boost compared to Xfce 4.14.
In addition to the Xfce and KDE Plasma editions, Manjaro ARM 21.02 also ships with a MATE edition featuring the latest MATE 1.24 desktop environment, as well as Minimal image and two other editions with the i3 and Sway tilling window managers if your ARM hardware doesn’t have enough RAM for Plasma or Xfce.
Another interesting change in the Manjaro ARM 21.02 release is the fact that the system now uses Plymouth as default splash screen to provide you with a more fancy boot experience. As far as I know, you’d be able to dismiss the Plymouth splash at any time to see the boot text by pressing the Esc key.
Manjaro ARM is currently available as installable images for the Raspberry Pi 3, 3+, 4, and 400, Pinebook and Pinebook Pro, Rock Pi 4B, Rock Pi 4C, RockPro64, Khadas Vim 1, 2, and 3, Khadas Edge-V Pro, as well as Odroid N2 and N2+ devices. However, you’d also be able to install it on the LibreComputer ROC-RK3328-CC, NanoPC T4, Odroid C2, Odroid C4, Pine64+, Pine64-LTS, Pine-H64, and Rock64 devices via the Manjaro ARM Installer.
You can download the Manjaro ARM 21.02 release right now from the forum announcement. Existing users need only to keep their installations up to date at all times to receive all the new packages from upstream and Manjaro ARM.
Last updated 3 years ago
