Manjaro has pushed the first stable-branch update in the upcoming “Anh-Linh” cycle, serving as a preview of the 25.1 release and introducing major changes to the desktop, kernel, and system components. However, the team is issuing a warning to users: do not update yet.
The reason is that several parts of the update require manual intervention, and in some cases, applying them without preparation may break existing systems (more on this below).
The release brings major upgrades such as Plasma 6.5.3, GNOME 49.2, (eventually) COSMIC Beta 9, LXQt 2.3, updated NVIDIA drivers, Blender 5.0, LibreOffice 25.8.3, a refreshed Mesa stack, and the first build of the Manjaro Control Panel.
As someone that has been using Manjaro for years now, I never understand the negativity. I take it as Arch users just being negative, as Manjaro doesn’t approach a problem the same way they would do one their own vanilla install.
The Manjaro team have enough confidence in their product, that they have a line of officially support laptops.