Getting back on topic, I have given the latest PCLinuxOS Plasma Edition a try yesterday, running off of a Ventoy’d USB stick. Yes, it was PCLinuxOS — I’m downloading the newly released Manjaro Sikaris .iso right now — but I’m also occasionally helping out at the PCLinuxOS forum, and it also comes with Plasma 5.24.6.
I’ve set it up to roughly resemble my installed Manjaro Plasma — “roughly”, because there are differences due to PCLinuxOS being a very different distribution.
For starters, even though it’s a rolling-release distro too, it’s not curated and it’s somewhat on par with Manjaro Testing or even Manjaro Unstable on account of the package versions. On the other hand, it is at the same time a very conservative distro that doesn’t use systemd and uses an older (and non-systemd-dependent) gdm by default as the display manager, even for Plasma.
So, what I’ve done is set it up with a global menu, and I installed the Opal Plasma theme from store.kde.org, as well as a window decoration that resembled mine. I also used the application dashboard widget instead of the standard application menu, because that’s what I have here in my installed system as well.
What I could not do was install a kvantum application theme, because kvantum is not included in the live image — strangely enough, it does include the newly rewritten desktop cube effect, as well as the Kate sessions widget, which appears to have been dropped in Manjaro’s KDE Frameworks package.
After I set it up, I logged out and back in — which was what caused the freezes here on my system when I upgraded from 5.24.6 LTS to 5.25 — and there were no issues.
So, keeping in mind that this was a different distribution and that I could not completely duplicate the exact setup I have here on my system with 5.24.7 LTS, Plasma 5.26.4 did appear to be stable during that test. And that is hopeful. 
