Manjaro 26.0 (aka "Anh-Linh") has been released with plenty of upgrades and a major change.

The upgrades are the usual suspects: kernel, pre-installed software, desktop environments, and toolchains. You'll get kernel 6.18, Xfce 4.20, Gnome 49, KDE Plasma 6.5, KDE Gear 25.12, KDE Frameworks 6.21, the NVIDIA 590 Linux driver, Mesa 25.3 graphics drivers, LibreOffice 25.8.4, Firefox 146, GStreamer 1.26.10 multimedia framework, WirePlumber 0.5.13 policy manager for PipeWire, ALSA 1.2.15.1, and more. In addition, this is also the first Manjaro release to include System76's COSMIC desktop environment.

The big change, however, has to do with Wayland and X.Org. Starting with Manjaro 26.0, both KDE Plasma and Gnome now default to Wayland. If using Wayland isn't your top priority, the only option you have for X.Org is Xfce. This is important because if you currently use Manjaro with a desktop environment that no longer supports X.Org, things could break in the upgrade if you try to stick with that combination.

For those who plan on running an upgrade from an older release, make sure to read this post by the Manjaro devs that explains some of the known issues before doing so.