14 DAY TRIAL // Earlier today, December 18, the Manjaro development team, through Philip Müller, was happy to announce the general availability of the second RC (Release Candidate) build of the upcoming Manjaro Linux 15.12 (Capella) computer operating system.
According to the release notes, Manjaro Linux 15.12 Release Candidate 2 is the biggest update the Manjaro team did for the Capella series, which is expected to launch by the end of the year. This might as well be the last RC build if no show stopping bugs turn up.
Why the biggest update for Manjaro Linux? Because it follows the development cycle of Arch Linux, so most of the package had to be rebuilt because of the major C++ 11 ABI change within GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) announced by the Arch devs a couple of weeks ago. As such, AUR package maintainers are now required to rebuild their packages for the new ABI, too.
"I’m happy to announce the second release candidate of Manjaro 15.12 (Capella)," said Philip Müller on behalf of the Manjaro Development Team. "It is always good to check for updated packages, even we don’t notify you about them. As usual people using our testing branch will help us to get snaps over to our stable branch almost smoothly."
What's new in Manjaro Linux 15.12 RC2
Besides having to rebuild most of the packages against the new ABI, the Manjaro Linux developers also managed to update the most popular applications and core components to their latest version available at the moment of the release. Therefore Manjaro Linux 15.12 RC2 ships with Mozilla Firefox 43.0, LibreOffice 5.0.4, KDE Plasma 5.5.1, Wine 1.8 RC4, and Linux kernel 4.2.8.
The Manjaro-Settings-Manager and Manjaro-Tools in-house built packages also received some attention in this release. You can download Manjaro Linux 15.12 KDE RC2 and Manjaro Linux 15.12 Xfce RC2 editions right now from Softpedia for 64-bit and 32-bit platforms. Please keep in mind, though, that these are pre-release versions and some features might be incomplete.