Blender & BlenderLTS should be treated as separate apps

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1

It would make more sense if Blender and BlenderLTS were treated as completely distinct apps in the package manager…

Blender 4.2 LTS (long-term support) was working perfectly on Manjaro, however, with the last round of package updates, we got force-updated into the buggy/experimental 4.3.0 version. Aside from the instability/freezes/crashes, non-LTS releases also incorporate experimental features which can cause irreversible changes to project files that are opened/saved with them (ie. save with 4.3.0 and it may not open in any 4.2.x LTS ever again.)

If you actually do work with Blender, you most likely chose 4.2LTS deliberately because you intended to stay with that stable version for the duration (ie. until the end of the support period on July 2026) so that you could complete your work and your projects without interruption. For this reason, if someone installs an LTS version, the package manager should respect that choice and only deliver future LTS updates; it should not force-upgraded someone into a non-LTS version just because the version number is higher. :slight_smile:

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Hi and welcome,

Blender is a package imported from Arch and is provided the same way it is there.

In the repos there are no ‘LTS’ or other variants, simply blender.

The Arch User Repository, a third party and unsupported source for PKGBUILDS, however does provide blender-lts-bin and associated packages. Should you choose to use one of those then you would not be ‘force-upgraded’ from those packages.

If you installed blender from the repos you didnt ‘choose an lts version’.
You just chose blender.

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3

You can download any version from the website, you can have as many versions as you want.

Here are the LTS downloads:

They’re portable so just download one, extract it somewhere and run it. It’ll never be updated.