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Manjaro has quietly dropped an early preview of its next release, version 26.1, going by the codename “Bian-May.” If you’ve been eager to get your hands on the upcoming installation media before it officially lands, now’s your chance. This preview comes a few months after Manjaro 26.0 “Anh-Linh” shipped in January 2026, and covers all three flagship editions Xfce, GNOME, and KDE Plasma.
GNOME Edition Gets a Grown-Up Upgrade
The headline change for GNOME users is the jump to the GNOME 50 series, which rolled out in March and has since been polished with additional fixes. One of the more practical additions is expanded parental controls we’re talking screen-time tracking, bedtime schedules, child account limits, automatic screen locking, and even the ability to grant temporary screen-time extensions on the fly. Families will appreciate how much more granular these controls have become.
Manjaro also bundles Big Parental Controls 1.0, borrowed from the Brazilian sibling project BigLinux, specifically to keep pace with recent legal requirements in Brazil.
On the performance side, hardware acceleration through Vulkan and VA-API means your GPU can now shoulder the burden of video streaming during remote sessions — less lag, lower power draw, better overall responsiveness. Explicit sync support rounds things out nicely for anyone running NVIDIA drivers, where stability has historically been a sore spot.
Display handling has also seen some love. Variable Refresh Rate and fractional scaling both feel more refined in this release, and cursor smoothness is maintained at the monitor’s peak refresh rate even when applications are chugging along at lower frame rates. Throw in Wayland color management protocol v2 and HDR screen sharing support, and GNOME 50 is shaping up to be quite a leap forward.
KDE Plasma Edition: New Features Worth Knowing
The Plasma edition comes loaded with Plasma 6.6 (specifically v6.6.4), KDE Frameworks 6.25, and the KDE Gear 26.04 apps collection. Among the notable usability improvements is the ability to convert your current desktop setup into a global theme handy if you want it to play nicely with day-and-night theme switching.
There’s also a new Plasma Setup feature that cleanly separates the technical side of installation (disk partitioning and the like) from the more user-friendly steps such as account creation and network setup. It’s a small but meaningful change that makes the out-of-box experience feel less intimidating.
Xfce Edition: Understated but Solid
Xfce 4.20 arrives in this preview with a handful of thoughtful tweaks. The Thunar file manager now lets you highlight files with custom background and foreground colors straight from the properties dialog — a surprisingly useful visual organization trick. Recursive file search is also now supported, making it easier to track down files buried deep in your directory tree.
The panel has been reworked to set its length in pixels rather than percentages, and there’s a new option to keep it above maximized windows, letting apps stretch behind it for a cleaner look. The Control Centre picks up new settings covering dialog header bars, file context menu behavior, and default multi-monitor handling.
Kernel and Availability
Manjaro 26.1 “Bian-May” boots with Linux kernel 7.0 as the default, bringing the freshest driver support for modern hardware. If you need something more conservative, Linux 6.18 LTS and 6.12 LTS are still available for long-term support and compatibility with older machines.
Preview images are available now across all three editions — Xfce, GNOME, and KDE Plasma. Head over to the official Manjaro forum announcement for download links and further details.
