The Manjaro Community has just announced the release of the stable JWM Edition 15.09 (Bellatrix), just a week after the launch of the development version.

The JWM flavor of Manjaro is a new distribution, and it was first presented on October 6. It looks like the developers have been really quick, and they have managed to get the ball rolling. We don't usually see such a short time between a Dev release and a stable one, but it's here, and we can now really enjoy it.

Some of the new Linux users might not have heard of the JWM, which stands for Joe’s Window Manager. This is not a desktop environment, but a windows manager, although most people won't refer to it as such. It's not a software stack, like GNOME, for example. It's also extremely light and has a minuscule memory footprint, which makes this distro ideal for older computers and laptops.

Manjaro JWM Edition 15.09 is here

Usually, distributions based on JWM are not designed for beginners. It uses a rather different desktop design, but users can pick up the basics of it pretty quick.

"JWM (Joe’s Window Manager) is a lightweight stacking window manager for the X Window System written by Joe Wingbermuehle. JWM is written in C and uses only Xlib at a minimum. Configuration is by editing an XML file - no graphical configuration is supplied. It features our well-known tools and graphical interfaces in a mix of fresh artwork from our community. This release comes with our advanced graphical installer Calamares as well as our CLI-installer. Stable branch was used to create these install media," reads the official announcement.

According to the changelog, Linux Kernel 4.1.10-1 has been integrated by default, JWM 2.3.2-1 is the default desktop solution, Manjaro Settings Manager 0.4.12-1 has been added, Pale Moon 25.7.1-1 is the default Internet browser, and a lot of other packages have been integrated as well.

You can download Manjaro JWM Edition 15.09 right now from Softpedia and take it for a spin.