Everyone's favorite Arch-based distribution, Manjaro, has a new preview release for the upcoming 26.1 version, and it's ready to show off plenty of new features and polish.

The big ticket items for this release are a new kernel and desktop environment versions.
First off, Manjaro will ship with kernel 7.0, but if you're not ready to leave the 6.x series behind, you can opt to go with either the Linux kernel 6.18 LTS or 6.12 LTS. The choice is yours. However, if you want serious performance gains, you'll want to stick with the new default (kernel 7.0).

As well, the major desktop environments are getting updated. In Manjaro 26.1, you'll find Gnome 50, KDE Plasma 6.6, and Xfce 4.20. Each of these desktop environments enjoys a wide variety of improvements, including native Parental Controls, stable Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) support, improved NVIDIA performance in Gnome 50, a new optional login manager, per-app volume control, and screen brightness automation. Also included are enhanced Wayland support in KDE Plasma and experimental Wayland support, improved HiDPI scaling, and significant file manager (Thunar) enhancements in Xfce.

You can get all the details on what each desktop environment brings to the table in this Manjaro forum post. If you want to test drive the Manjaro 26.1 preview, download the ISO for Gnome, KDE, or Xfce.