Arch-based Manjaro Linux 15.09 'Bellatrix' available now
A gift and curse of Linux-based operating systems is the large selection. It is very cool that there are so many operating systems to choose from, but a good amount of them are crap. In other words, you have to sift through hundreds of fringe distros to discover the gems.
One such gem is Manjaro Linux. This Arch-based distribution is well-designed and offers a great out-of-the-box experience. While not ideal for beginners, it is a solid choice for advanced Linux users who don't have the time or patience for a vanilla Arch install. Today, Manjaro reaches version 15.09, code-named 'Bellatrix'.
"Since June we are working on this release. First thing you will notice, this release was not tagged 0.9.0 as we would have normally done. Well, we had a discussion with all developers and decided to go for date tags from now on", says Philip Müller, Manjaro Development Team.
Müller further says, "we ship with Calamares as an alternative graphical installer. It is now stable enough to be used on productive systems. You can still use Thus. Also our terminal installer got some small improvements. With this we updated Firefox to 41 series, pulseaudio to 7.0, linux313 to 3.13.11.27, linux319 to 3.19.8.7, added some dbus fixes, adjusted Mate in regard of polkit, plus fixed some issues in our tools".
If you want to download this wonderful Linux-based operating system, you can do so here.
For convenience, I would suggest the ISOs with the pre-installed desktop environments. While KDE is arguably the superior environment, Xfce should be a better choice for less-powerful systems. In other words, if your machine is aging, you may want to give the latter a go.
Are you a Manjaro Linux user? Tell me in the comments.