Manjaro 0.8.8 RC3, a Linux distribution based on well-tested snapshots of the Arch Linux repositories and 100% compatible with Arch, has been released and is available for testing.

Manjaro has become one of the most successful Arch-based distributions out there, and the developers are working on improving it as we speak.

“I’m happy to announce our third public release candidate of Manjaro 0.8.8 featuring Pamac 0.9.1 (Xfce), Octopi 0.3 (optional) and Thus, our new graphical simplified installer. This release is based on our stable branch, so everybody can test this release. Our Openbox flavour has changed,” said the developers in the official announcement.

The developers have also said that this is probably the last release candidate that will be launched, but if something goes wrong with this version, they might get another development image out the door.

“We worked hard on thus our graphical installer to get as much bugs and issues out of the system. Currently GPT support and EFI is broken and we have to find either a way to fix it or we even have to disable it for our upcoming stable release. Pamac supports AUR from now on. Later this week we will upload our KDE edition,” the developers added.

Manjaro 0.8.8 RC3 is now based on Linux kernel Linux 3.10.19 LTS, XFCE 4.10 (with backported 4.11 applications), Openbox 3.5.2, Thus 0.8, the latest proprietary and free drivers (Catalyst 13.4, Nvidia 331.20), LibreOffice 4.1.3 (only for the Xfce flavor), and all the update packs, 1 through 10, that have been release so far.

More details about this release can be found in the official announcement. Download Manjaro 0.8.8 RC3 right now from Softpedia.

Remember that this is a development version and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended for testing purposes only.