content: adding 2023 and 2022 news

content/news/2022/manjaro-arm-aug.md

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+---
+title: "August 2022 In Manjaro ARM"
+draft: true
+date: 2022-08-25 12:00:00
+kind: article
+image: header.jpg
+description: "22.08 Has Been Released, Raspberry Pi Kernels Delayed, 2.06 Download Statistics"
+authors: [danjohn]
+---
+### Manjaro ARM 22.08 released!
+Every other month we release new images for some of the most popular ARM devices on the market. And this month was no exception. This month we released pre-made images for 15 devices, including the new **RK356X** based ones like **Quartz64** and the **Rock 3A**. We also included images for the **Orange Pi 3 LTS** and **Orange Pi 4 LTS** from <a href="https://orangepi.com/">Orange Pi</a>.
+
+Of course we also had to turn down the amount of pre-made images we make, when we add support for new devices. So pre-made images for the Odroid N2's, Rock Pi 4's and a couple of older Pine64 boards are no longer created. The devices are mostly supported by our <a href="https://github.com/manjaro-arm/generic-images/releases">generic image</a> at this point and can also be installed via our CLI installer script manjaro-arm-installer.
+
+Listings of old images have been removed from our website, so to not clutter it up to much with all the new ones there.
+
+### No updates for Raspberry Pi kernels in a while
+Some eagle-eyed users might have noticed that there has been no updates to the Raspberry Pi kernels and boot-loaders for a while. I would like to dig a bit into why that is without saying to much. Our Raspberry Pi maintainer has been hospitalized since the beginning of August with a serious condition. He has undergone several surgeries and many, many days in the CCU.
+
+I am glad to report that he is doing fine at this point and will resume his good work on our Raspberry Pi specific packages. So updates to them should happen again pretty soon, but we want our team members to be in good health, so we completely understand if he wants to take some time to recover and other team members will try to update the packages as best we can.
+
+In the mean time, other team members will perform normal updates to these packages.
+
+### 22.06 download statistics
+Some of you might be wondering how popular each device is amongst the Manjaro ARM users.
+
+We don't have very specific statistics, but one we do have is the download number for the assets in GitHub, where our images are hosted. So here is a quick rundown of the **22.06** image download numbers. These numbers are measured from release day of 22.06 and up to late August 2022. So about 2 months.
+
+These numbers include pkg-list, torrent and checksum files, but the vast majority are the images themselves.
+
+1. Generic: 59315
+2. Raspberry Pi 4: 52374
+3. Khadas Vim 3: 3670
+4. Khadas Vim 2: 3531
+5. Odroid C4: 3257
+6. Pinebook Pro: 3076
+7. Rock Pi 4B: 1398
+8. Ugoos AM6 Plus: 1165
+9. RockPro64: 1140
+10. Odroid N2+: 1095
+11. Radxa Zero: 1038
+12. Odroid N2: 981
+13. Pinebook: 967
+14. Rock Pi 4C: 923
+15. Pine64 LTS: 917
+16. Rock64: 893
+17. Pine H64: 879
+18. Odroid HC4: 855
+
+The big surprise this time, was that the **Generic** images where the most downloaded "device" with just over **59000** downloads, compared to the **Raspberry Pi 4**, which is second at just over **52000**. Only 6 devices have more than 3000 downloads over 2 months. Images for many of the devices below 2000 downloads are not part of the 22.08 release.

content/news/2022/manjaro-arm-dec.md

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+---
+title: "December 2022 In Manjaro ARM"
+draft: true
+date: 2022-12-27 12:00:00
+kind: article
+image: header.jpg
+description: "Merry Christmas And A Happy New Year, Hardware Accelerated Video Decoding On Rockchip,
+22.12 Released, PlaMo Beta 14 Released, 22.10 Download Statistics"
+authors: [vlopes]
+---
+**Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year**
+
+From all of us on the Manjaro ARM team, we wish you a merry christmas and a happy new year. 2022 has been a year where many things have changed, lots of new devices was introduced and announced and improvements have been implemented. It's been a year with ups and downs, happy times and sad times.
+
+To mentions a few of the things that happened, I'll start off by mentioning our Generic and Generic EFI images. These images made it possible for us to reach a range of devices that was not previously in our grasp. The Generic images would still be relying on the DTS provided by the kernel, but it was automatically chosen by the board firmware, which was now a requirement of the Board Vendor or user to provide instead of us as a distribution. And building on that premise, we created the Generic EFI images which, as the name suggests, requires the board firmware to be EFI capable. We suggest Tow-Boot in our wiki as that's one we know works for a lot of boards. The EFI images also enabled us to get proper support for multiple kernels being installed at the same time, as they don't use the kernel DTB files anymore, but rather rely on the DTB used when the EFI firmware was built. This also made it possible for us to use the GRUB bootloader, to manage booting the kernels we want. Dans Pinebook Pro install currently has 3 kernels installed, linux515, linux60 and linux61.
+
+2022 was also the year where one of our team members went to the hospital because of heart complications. He is still recovering and is slowly regaining his strength, but it did mean a few changes to our Raspberry Pi workflows. Dan took over maintaining most of the Raspberry Pi related packages, while other things are contributed by the community.
+
+This was also the year we started using this blog. The blog is a great way to keep our community updated with happenings within project and tell you guys about stuff that does not really fit into forum release posts.
+
+Thank you all for a great 2022 and maybe we have an awesome 2023 together!
+
+### Hardware Accelerated Video Decoding on Rockchip
+Furkan, from the team, has been hard at work lately trying to get hardware accelerated video playback working on our devices.
+
+We can now announce that we have packages available in the repository for rockchip devices to enable this functionality. But there are some caveats though. It only works with local media, it needs a special ffmpeg package based on version 4.4, only works in wayland it seems, and only works with special mediaplayers compiled with the support, which we have provided as mpv-rk and kodi-rk.
+
+So to enable this functionality on your rockchip based device, install ffmpeg-rk, kernel-api-header-60 and mpv-rk or kodi-rk.
+
+### 2.12 released
+This month we released the last images of 2022. 22.12 does not have many new features, but has lots of package updates.
+
+This release also re-introduced the Pinebook Pro images as a result of popular demand.
+
+### Plasma Mobile Beta 14 released
+Hot on the heels of Beta 13 last month, we did Beta 14 this month. Beta 14 sports the new Plasma Mobile Gear 22.11 applications, together with Plasma 5.26 and up to date system packages.
+
+The kernel was 6.1.0-rc8, which is basically the released 6.1.0 kernel.
+
+### 22.10 download statistics
+So here is a quick rundown of the 22.10 image download numbers. These numbers are measured from release day of 22.10 and up to late December 2022. So about 2 months.
+
+These numbers include pkg-list, torrent and checksum files, but the vast majority are the images themselves.
+
+* Raspberry Pi 4: 54180
+* Generic: 49452
+* Generic EFI: 5413
+* Khadas Vim 2: 3581
+* Khadas Vim 3: 3564
+* Odroid M1: 975
+* Orange Pi 3 LTS: 943
+* Radxa Zero: 889
+* Rock 3A: 859
+* Quartz64 Model A: 807
+* Ugoos AM6 Plus: 767
+* Odroid C4: 738
+* Quartz64 Model B: 723
+* Odroid HC4: 661
+* Orange Pi 800: 621

content/news/2022/manjaro-arm-july.md

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+---
+title: "July 2022 In Manjaro ARM"
+draft: true
+date: 2022-08-01 12:00:00
+kind: article
+image: header.jpg
+description: "July 2022 In Manjaro ARM"
+authors: [danjohn]
+---
+### Plasma Mobile Beta 12
+This month saw the long awaited release of the Plasma Mobile Beta 12 images. It has been a couple of months since the release of Beta 11, so it was about time for a new one. Plasma 5.25 and Plasma Mobile Gear 22.06 was released recently, so it made sense to create a brand new Beta image. Not much as changed in this Beta, it's mostly package updates all around, but to reduce the initial update size after flashing the latest image, we released this one. If you already have a Plasma Mobile image, that you have kept up to date, it should functionally be the same.
+
+### Upstream WiFi firmware for more Pine64 devices
+The latest tag of the Linux-firmware package now includes WiFi firmware for a couple of **Pine64** devices, like Quartz64-B and the new batch of Pinebook Pro. Because of chip shortages, Pine64 has decided to ship different WiFi chips on the new Pinebook Pro batch. The good thing about this, is that they have chosen a chip that already has firmware upstream so we don't have to track down and ship yet another firmware package. The only thing that was missing was the NVRAM file for it, but that has just been included upstream in Linux-firmware as of the latest release. So WiFi and Bluetooth will now work on most distributions out-of-the-box on the Pinebook Pro. The same thing happened to the new Pinephone Pro batch and the same solution is already available.
+
+### Kernel 5.19.0 released
+The release of kernel 5.19 is something we at Manjaro ARM have waiting for. This kernel finally has the work to enable VOP2 in upstream for RK35XX based systems, like the **Quartz64** and **Rock** 3A boards. Only a few things are missing for full functionality, but we have patched those in so we can have the best support possible for these devices with 5.19. So we will likely make release images for the RK356X platform with the upcoming 22.08 release. *fingers crossed*

content/news/2022/manjaro-arm-jun.md

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+---
+title: "
+June 2022 In Manjaro ARM"
+draft: true
+date: 2022-07-05 12:00:00
+kind: article
+image: header.jpg
+description: "Release 22.06, Generic Image Compatible With More Devices, KDE Plasma 5.25, Plasma Mobile Gear, Rk35xx Development."
+authors: [danjohn]
+---
+### 22.06 released
+The big news of this month for Manjaro ARM, is of course the 22.06 release. This release, just like last release, we created 108 images ready to be flashed onto eMMC, SD cards and USB sticks for 18 different devices. Our most popular device, the Raspberry Pi 4, also has its images presented in the Raspberry Pi Imager application directly.
+
+Now the development for the next release has begun. Personally I hope that the next release, will be where we start to introduce release images for some devices based on the rk356x platform, like the Quartz64 and Odroid M1, which we already have development images for. We need at least kernel 5.19 (with some extra DTS patches) for that to happen though and 5.19.0 is scheduled for release in early-mid August.
+
+### Generic image becoming more useful
+The last couple of releases, we have had Generic images, which as the name implies, are not tailored to specific devices, but should be usable on a wide range of devices, as long as the kernel supports them. The current platforms we have in our kernel are allwinner, rockchip, amlogic/meson, tegra and apple. The main prerequisite for this image, is that the device has working Board Firmware, that can boot mainline DTB, on a storage device that the Generic image is not on. This is usually the SPI flash, but could also be eMMC or SD card depending on the device in question. We are slowly, but steadily, testing out the Generic image on more and more devices.
+
+The devices we have currently tested to be mostly working are:
+
+* Pine64 LTS
+* Odroid N2(+)
+* Pinebook Pro
+
+There are also some tests being done on other devices, like Pinephone and Rock Pi 4 devices. But the current Generic images, do not have a mobile friendly interface, so the Pinephone tests have been limited to just booting. More tests on more devices will be coming down the road, as we find Board Firmware for them.
+
+### Plasma 5.25
+Plasma 5.25 was released this month and a few days after it arrived in our Unstable branch and quickly found it's way to Testing branch. This release should have many bug fixes all around and a couple of nice new features.
+
+### Plasma Mobile Gear 22.06
+Shortly after the release of Plasma 5.25 came the new 22.06 release of Plasma Mobile Gear, which is all the mobile centric applications from KDE. These include improvements to applications such as Angelfish, Kasts, Neochat, Spacebar, Dialer and so on. This means we will likely have a Beta 12 of the Plasma Mobile images some time in July.
+
+### rk35xx development
+At Manjaro ARM, we are one of the leading OS options for rk356x based boards, as we have development images for Quartz64 Model A and B, PineNote, Rock 3A, Odroid M1 and a couple of others. Mainline development is at a place now, where most of the missing pieces are DTS changes, where many are queued for inclusion in 5.20. So most of the boards use <code>linux-rc</code> package right now, with a bunch of DTS patches for the platform.
+
+Regarding rk3588, only basic support is in our kernel as it's slowly getting submitted to the kernel mailing list.

content/news/2022/manjaro-arm-nov.md

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+---
+title: "November 2022 In Manjaro ARM"
+draft: true
+date: 2022-11-27 12:00:00
+kind: article
+image: header.jpg
+description: "Slow Updates From Arch Linux ARM, Plasma Mobile Beta 13 Released, Pinebook Pro Images Will Be Back"
+authors: [vlopes]
+---
+**NOVEMBER 2022 IN MANJARO ARM**
+
+### Slow updates from Arch Linux ARM
+During November, Arch Linux ARM seems to have had some slowdown, regarding package update frequency. Sometimes it could take multiple days between any package updates from Arch Linux ARM, resulting in also Manjaro ARMs Unstable branch getting these big batches of package updates. Sometimes 500+ packages at a time. We don't know why this happened, but we do hope that if the Arch Linux ARM team is looking into improving it. Some big rebuilds have happened in this time, like Qt 5.15.7 and OpenSSL 3, which did require many packages to be rebuilt.
+
+### Plasma Mobile Beta 13 released
+We try to release new Beta images for Plasma Mobile regularly when there's a new Plasma release or Plasma Mobile Gear releases. The last couple of ones have been quite unstable compared to the usual, which is why we have been hesitant to release Beta 13 to early.
+
+But now we decided to release it anyway, even though the real functionality updates are not noticeable. Lots of small things have been looked into though.
+
+We had a Beta 13 image on our Github CI builds for a little while, but it was replaced by a new one a couple of weeks after, so it had some more updated packages, like Plasma 5.26.2 and Plasma Mobile Gear 22.09, kernel 6.0 and lots of other new stuff.
+
+It has a couple of new issues though, like Megapixels is not working on the Pro with kernel 6.0 and the Dialer can be pretty unreliable. I've seen it crash PulseAudio and also the telephony daemon of KDE.
+
+### Pinebook Pro images will be back
+Due to popular demand, the Manjaro ARM team has decided to provide Pinebook Pro specific images again.
+
+While the Generic and Generic EFI images, for the most part, works just fine on the Pinebook Pro, many users have mistakenly thought that we no longer support the Pinebook Pro when the images where no longer present on the website. So while we will be focusing more and more on the generic implementation for the rk3399 devices, like the Pinebook Pro, we still support the good old device specific images. To convey this better, the 22.12 release next month will bring back the Pinebook Pro specific images.
+
+To clarify, the main differences between the generic images and the Pinebook Pro specific images are that the device specific images come with a Pinebook Pro specific u-boot pre-installed and has a package installed to work around the audio issues. That is it.
+
+So we will still recommend using the generic images together with the proper board firmware on SPI over the device specific image. To get audio working on the generic image, installing the "pinebook-pro-post-install" package should be enough.

content/news/2022/manjaro-arm-oct.md

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+---
+title: "October 2022 In Manjaro ARM"
+draft: true
+date: 2022-10-27 12:00:00
+kind: article
+image: header.jpg
+description: "S22.10 Released, Issue With Qt5-Es2-Wayland, Kernel 6.0, 22.08 Download Statistic"
+authors: [vlopes]
+---
+### 22.10 released!
+This month, as every other month does, included the 22.10 release builds. Not much has changed since the 22.08 release other than software updates on most devices. But we do have a new series of images this time around.
+
+Introducing the generic-efi images. They have the same requirements as the regular generic images and are very similar. Except for 3 main points.
+
+1. They run using EFI.
+2. They use GRUB as the bootloader
+3. They can have multiple kernels installed at the same time!
+We hinted at this in the <a href="https://blog.manjaro.org/september-2022-in-manjaro-arm/">September blog post</a>, but now it's an official release. The images ship with the latest LTS kernel (linux515 at this point), but you can install more kernels. Currently available to install are linux515 (LTS, default), linux519 (stable), linux60 (stable). This kernel versioning will mimic the x64 kernels well.
+
+These kernels will be maintained until kernel.org marks them as EOL (End Of Life).
+
+### Issue with qt5-es2-wayland
+For a couple of years we have been working with the Plasma Mobile team to provide a good experience on our supported mobile devices. The Pinephone in particular has been needing tweaks and optimizations because of the not-so-powerful GPU. Therefore Plasma Mobile developers have recommended using QT built with Open GLES 2 support for a long time. We provided Open GLES 2 based qt5-base, qt5-declarative, qt5-multimedia and qt5-wayland packages for along time and also certain others that needed rebuilds against these to work on Plasma Mobile, like pyside2 and others.
+
+However, almost a year ago, the Plasma Mobile developers clarified that qt5-wayland build for OpenGLES 2 was not actually needed, so we switched our Plasma Mobile images to use the regular qt5-wayland package.
+
+Of course old images/installs where still using the OpenGLES 2 based package, so we have tried keeping it up to date for that reason. But then at the start of this month, reports came in that some installs, not all, didn't launch Plasma Mobile anymore and it seemed to be because of an old version of qt5-es2-wayland, because it could not be updated. The reason why users could not update the package, seems be because of an error in our package repository, where the package and the signature was the same size, ergo a broken signature file. While we are not sure why this error happened, we did know that the version from arm-unstable branch was working, so we fast-forwarded that to both arm-testing and arm-stable branches. While people where now able to install that update, it seemed it did not fix the main issue of Plasma Mobile not launching.
+
+So we decided to remove qt5-es2-wayland entirely from current installs and replace it with regular qt5-wayland, via an update to our manjaro-system package.
+
+### Kernel 6.0
+This month also brought us the release of Kernel 6.0. As many know, the major version numbers don't actually mean anything. So we already added
+6.0 to our arm-unstable branch on its release day and it has since made its way through the branches and are now included in most of our 22.10 release images.
+
+### 22.08 download statistics
+So here is a quick rundown of the 22.08 image download numbers. These numbers are measured from release day of 22.08 and up to late October 2022. So about 2 months.
+
+These numbers include pkg-list, torrent and checksum files, but the vast majority are the images themselves.
+
+Raspberry Pi 4: 71561
+
+Generic: 68654
+
+Khadas Vim 3: 4749
+
+Khadas Vim 2: 4703
+
+Odroid C4: 4360
+
+Orange Pi 4 LTS: 1489
+
+Radxa Zero: 1477
+
+Odroid M1: 1407
+
+Orange Pi 3 LTS: 1347
+
+Ugoos AM6 Plus: 1336
+
+Rock 3A: 1278
+
+Quartz64 Model B: 1210
+
+Quartz64 Model A: 1162
+
+Odroid HC4: 1106
+