Manjaro’s latest stable update appears to effectively mark the completion of the upcoming Manjaro 26.1 “Bian-May” release, which has been in development for the past several months. In an announcement today, Manjaro project lead Philip Müller specifically said that it “should mark the release of ‘Bian-May’”.
For existing Manjaro users, no separate upgrade procedure is needed. Since the distro follows a rolling-release model, users on the Stable branch will move to the Bian-May 26.1 package state by performing a full system update. There is no need to reinstall the distribution or wait for the final 26.1 ISO images to benefit from the updated software stack.
There have been many changes since the first Bian-May preview appeared in May. At that time, Manjaro 26.1 was being prepared with Linux kernel 7.0, KDE Plasma 6.6, GNOME 50, and Xfce 4.20. After today’s full Stable update, our KDE installation now identifies as “Bian-May 26.1” and runs KDE Plasma 6.7.4 and Linux kernel 7.1. The latest COSMIC Desktop 1.5 is also available.
The kernel change is notable because Linux 7.0 has reached end of life. Manjaro now recommends moving to Linux 7.1 or one of the supported LTS branches. The current kernel lineup includes Linux 7.1 alongside Linux 6.18, 6.12, 6.6, and 6.1. Linux kernel 7.2-rc7 is also available for users interested in testing the next kernel series.
According to Manjaro, the Stable repositories received changes affecting more than 1,000 packages, including those in the Extra repository alone. Among the notable updates are GStreamer 1.28.6, Bazaar 0.9.2, OpenSearch 3.8, Syncthing 2.1, along with a large collection of Python, Deepin, and Haskell updates. The Manjaro team also notes that recent amdgpu regressions are most likely resolved with the updated kernels.
Python users should pay particular attention to the move to Python 3.14. Manjaro warns that AUR packages installing files into site-packages or linking against libpython3.13.so need to be rebuilt after the update. The project recommends checking the affected packages and rebuilding them once the system upgrade is complete.
There is also an important change for owners of older NVIDIA graphics cards. NVIDIA’s 590 driver series no longer supports Pascal, including GeForce GTX 10-series cards, or older GPU generations. In light of this, Manjaro users with Pascal, Maxwell, or older hardware therefore need to switch to the legacy 580xx driver packages to retain working proprietary NVIDIA support.
And even though Manjaro has not yet published its usual standalone announcement formally declaring the Manjaro 26.1 “Bian-May” release, for current Manjaro Stable users, Bian-May is effectively here. The separate official release announcement and corresponding final installation images are expected soon.
Great distro.
I like it still enable X11 desktops and Wm.
Not only wayland, like others…
Never had problems with Manjaro.
One of the best alternative to Windows.
Excellent distro.
It is often underrated due to a few updates going wrong for a few users more than 10 years ago, and die hard naysayers still basing their opinion on this. While about every Manjaro user in the last 10 years never had a single update breaking their system.
It also has excellent in-house tooling, like pamac manager GUI, which is the best software installer in my opinion.
I am no longer using Manjaro myself, but Manjaro has been very good to me, and I only have good words for it. Just avoid the forums, as developers and moderators can be extremely toxic.