We’re kicking off 2026 with the release of Ganymede Neo. As you are accustomed to with our Neo releases, this release includes upstream updates and minor changes compared to the Ganymede ISO.
Before I go into the release notes, I just want to remind you of the following.
The changes described over here are affecting new installs, our Calamares installer, and the Live environment on the ISO only. Running systems don’t have to “upgrade” to Ganymede Neo; if you update regularly, your system is fine.
The Ganymede Neo release
This ISO and offline installer ships with:
Calamares 26.01.1.5-1
Firefox 146.0.1-1
Linux 6.18.4.arch1-1
Mesa 1:25.3.3-2
Xorg-server 21.1.21-1 (xorg)
Nvidia-utils 590.48.01-2
And has the following bugfixes:
- The long startup time issue with Calamares has been resolved.
- The package Nemo preview was removed from the default package bundle for Cinnamon and Budgie during installation due to its removal from the Arch repository.
- Starting with this release, the NVIDIA proprietary drivers have been switched to nvidia-open due to the upstream changes to NVIDIA drivers: https://archlinux.org/news. As a result, the proprietary option now only supports Turing GPUs(16xx) and later. Earlier NVIDIA GPUs are still supported using the default boot option, which will use the Nouveau open-source drivers.
These are all the changes Ganymede Neo ships with to ensure a smooth ISO boot and installation. We are currently hard at work with further refinements and additions for Ganymede’s successor, Titan. So keep an eye out for our announcements.
Ganymede Neo is available on our homepage.
What’s llvmpipe initializing with?
Could you give us more info on what you were trying to do?