By Larry Cafiero
Hand it to Dibakar Ghosh at HowToGeek.com for taking the time to do this, and while the story is a couple of weeks old, it bears repeating today. Ghosh took the time to test nine – count ‘em, nine – Arch-based distros – in the middle of the AUR hubbub, no less – and provide readers with a list of ninth to first.
“Most Arch-based distros either preserve that minimalism while reducing complexity, or they go all-in on power, performance, and extra features,” Ghosh writes. “After testing many options, these nine stood out—and here’s how I’d rank them according to my needs and workflow.”
Because it seems that there are many distro based on Arch, the usual suspects appear in the story, with plausible explanations regarding why Ghosh has ranked them as he did. While I have no argument with the rankings as such – and it includes a couple I would have never considered at all – I still think that Manjaro, for all its recent turmoil, is still the best distro of the lot, and he ranks it at number five.
Seriously?
So what did he rank first? Not a chance – read the article. It’s worth the few minutes of your time
KDE Plasma 6.8 taking shape
Fun fact: The release of KDE Plasma 6.8 in October is scheduled to coincide with the 30th anniversary of the founding of KDE. That said, we thought we’d check in on developments in the Wayland-only desktop environment.
Sven Bauduin at PC Games Hardware wrote an update earlier this month about it, in which he wrote that the major development is the departure of X11 for just Wayland.
“With Plasma 6.8, the login screen will only offer the Plasma Wayland session,” Bauduin writers. “KDE also plans to remove X11-specific code from Plasma Shell, System Settings and device configuration in this release. That makes Plasma 6.7 the last version expected to ship with a dedicated X11 session. It is scheduled for mid-June 2026, while Plasma 6.8 is currently expected around October 14, 2026.”
According to KDE developer David Edmundson, all is not lost for those who depend on the X11 window system to operate their software.
“Wayland support remains present,” writes Edmundson is his blog. “You can keep using your X11 applications, and our XWayland application support is second-to-none.
Edmundson continues to say that if you use KDE applications on another desktop environment, this change will have no effect. He reassures users that “KDE applications will continue to work in X11 for the foreseeable future.”
First Kernel 7.2 release candidate
Marcus Nestor at 9 to 5 Linux reported on Sunday that Linus Torvalds announced on Sunday the general availability of the first Release Candidate (RC) of the upcoming Linux 7.2 kernel series for public testing and early adopters.
Two weeks have passed since the release of Linux kernel 7.1 and the opening of the merge window for Linux kernel 7.2 for contributors to submit their patches, which means that it’s now time to test drive the Release Candidate (RC) versions during the next couple of months, every Sunday afternoon,” the article states.
During this two-week merge window, the Linux 7.2 kernel received many new features and improvements, most notably support for devres-based management of ACPI notify handlers, initial HDMI 2.1 FRL support to the AMDGPU driver, initial CRI platform support for the Intel Xe driver, and Intel CPU model number support for Panther Lake R series.
“Linux 7.2 also promises to introduce support for the ‘zerocopy’ library to the Rust support to make zero-cost memory manipulation effortless, new hwcaps for the 2025 dpISA extensions for the AArch64 (ARM64) architecture, and enable large folios by default for the Btrfs file system,” the article says.
And that’s all for today. Don’t forget: Distro of the Week appears Wednesday – and it’s always a good one on hand – and Bits and Bobs will return on Friday.