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.
At the same time, core components such as Qt 6.10.1, Systemd 258, PipeWire 1.4.9, GStreamer 1.26.9, and Grub 2.14rc1 also received updates. The release is powered by the Linux kernel 6.12 LTS and marks the removal of the now-EOL 6.16 series, as well as the addition of the 6.17 and 6.18 LTS branches.
Alongside these upgrades, according to devs, the stable branch registered more than 7,000 new packages and over 7,000 removals in the extra repository alone, marking one of the largest refreshes in recent cycles.
Yet despite the extensive improvements, several breaking changes mean that users are strongly advised to postpone updating. Above all, Plasma 6.5 now installs only a Wayland session unless users manually add the plasma-x11-session package. So, anyone still running X11 who overlooks this step may find themselves unable to log in after updating.
Similarly, GNOME 49 removes the X11 session entirely, aligning with upstream plans to discontinue X11 support in GNOME 50. While XWayland still allows legacy applications to run, the desktop itself cannot run under X11.
Last but not least, mkinitcpio v40, Arch’s tool that builds the initramfs (the small early-boot image the kernel uses to start your system before the real filesystem loads), no longer creates fallback initramfs images on new installations.
In light of this, existing systems require manual adjustments to their preset files to achieve consistent behavior, and users who depend on fallback images need to ensure they have rescue media on hand. So once again, please hold off on updating for now.
For more information, see the announcement.
