Today, we take a closer look at a brand-new edition of the popular Arch Linux-based Manjaro operating system, Manjaro Pantheon, created by a member of the Manjaro community by the name of Stefano Capitani.

As you might have guessed, Manjaro Pantheon is an unofficial flavor of this operating system built around the Pantheon desktop environment that is used in the well-known elementary OS distro. If you've ever dreamed of running elementary OS' desktop in Arch Linux, now you can with Manjaro Pantheon.

Manjaro Pantheon is currently in development with a Pre2 version ready for testing only for 64-bit systems. It is based on the stable Manjaro Linux 0.8.12 operating system and uses the Linux kernel 3.19 packages. A Preview version is available for download right now.

Beautiful Pantheon has a new home in Manjaro Pantheon

We all have to agree that the Pantheon desktop environment of the Ubuntu-based elementary OS is beautiful, despite the fact that its core components are quite old.

But we're not here to talk about elementary OS, as the beautiful Pantheon desktop has a new home in the Manjaro Pantheon distribution. Just look at the screenshot tour we've prepared for your viewing pleasure if you don't believe us or take it for a spin today (download links at the end of the article).

After half a day of usage, we've come to the conclusion that the Manjaro Pantheon distribution offers a better Pantheon desktop experience than the one delivered by elementary OS, with the exception of a few minor graphical glitches that will most likely be patched in the final release. And we really dug the Applications Menu used.

What's included in Manjaro Pantheon

The software selection of Manjaro Pantheon is another strong point of the distribution. It includes the regular apps that you can also find in elementary OS, such as Photos, Geary, Audience (Videos), Scratch, Plank, Slingscold, Midori, and Gloobus Preview.

Also, the Pantheon edition of Manjaro Linux ships with popular applications like GIMP image editor, SUSE Studio ImageWriter, GNOME Tweak Tool, Cheese, Brasero, Ristretto, Simple Scan, GNOME's California calendar, and the entire LibreOffice office suite.

For a complete out-of-the-box experience, Manjaro Pantheon also includes the OpenJDK 8 and Adobe Flash Player plugins.

You can download Manjaro Pantheon 0.8.12 Pre2 right now from Softpedia, but keep in mind that it's a pre-release version that contains unresolved issues.