Linux News Today: After Arch Linux, Now Manjaro Drops Support for KDE 4, Switches to Plasma 5.5

This past weekend, the developers of the Manjaro Linux operating system have announced that general availability of Manjaro Update 2015-12-13, which is now in the testing repositories of Manjaro Linux 15.12 "Capella".

According to Mr. Philip Müller, the lead developer of Manjaro Linux, this is the biggest update they've done until now, mostly because of the C++ 11 ABI change within the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) packages, something that the upstream Arch Linux developers already managed to do. What this means exactly, is that most of the packages have been rebuilt.

"This is one of the biggest updates we did so far. Mostly due the C++ 11 ABI change within gcc. It is recommended to rebuild your AUR packages for this ABI," said Philip Müller on behalf of the Manjaro Development Team. "With this we finally dropping KDE4 for good. All users of this desktop should either switch over to Plasma 5 or any other maintained desktop, like LXQt."

Support for KDE 4 has been dropped

We reported a few days ago that the Arch Linux developers announced end-of-life support for the KDE 4 desktop environment in their main software repositories, urging users to either move to a supported repo that contains the KDE 4 packages, or upgrade to the next-generation KDE Plasma 5.5 desktop environment. Today, the Arch Linux devs also announced the removal of the KDE 4 packages from the distro's main repos.

Besides the huge KDE Plasma 5.5 update with all of its goodies, Manjaro Update 2015-12-13 also adds new versions of the LibreOffice office suite and Mesa 3D Graphics Library, along with profile structure changes for Manjaro-Tools, and all of the software updates and security patches that have been released in the upstream Arch Linux repositories as of December 13, 2015.

Supported Linux kernels include Linux 4.3.2, Linux 4.2.7, Linux 4.1.14 LTS, Linux 3.19.8.11, Linux 3.18.24 LTS, Linux 3.16.7.20, Linux 3.14.58 LTS, Linux 3.13.11.31, Linux 3.12.51 LTS, Linux 3.10.94 LTS, and Linux 4.4 LTS Release Candidate 4. We suggest clicking on each one to see what's new.

Via Softpedia