Kwin will break as soon as the Qt 5.15.7 updates will hit stable branch. You can always have a look at Arch Upstream changes for kwin. The second factor may be issues with frameworks updates.
KDE software is like this: You have frameworks, plasma and apps (gear - don’t know why the new name, but anyway). Each of those elements play closely together. Some frameworks update already broke 5.24.x series. That is why Ubuntu and others who have fixed DE versions also won’t update frameworks.
Maintaining LTS releases might be hard as you have to know your shareholders - distros actually using it. Manjaro is non of those. Having that github was only some side project of mine as some Manjaro staffers had issues with 5.25.x updates.
Also there is a reason why I use XFCE as my working DE for maintaining this distro as Lead Developer. Anarchy sometimes works but having a more company like structure can be better. Gnome development is totally different and XFCE development is something completely else. Each has its pros and cons. XFCE has a very small developer group and Xubuntu as main stakeholder. Even there they ship 4.17.x development releases. At some point when we shipped the latest git-master packages as overlay packages a lot of people out there got in love with XFCE and it showed that even random commits didn’t break that DE as other DEs might have.
Then there are the crazy daily commit builds we call kde-unstable. Those are mostly for KDE developers as it really may break stuff. We started that as we work closely on Plasma Mobile with them, a small group doing the Phone/Tablet UIs. There we also have breakage as the main focus is still on desktop mode. So even within KDE development there is some cat and mouse game. Anyway, KDE developers are super friendly and also fast in fixing issues when they face them also. Also you can decide as a developer what issues or features are more important to your project and maybe your userbase. In the end a friendly communication bi-directorial is always key.
The third issue are debug symbols. Arch used to have non of them. They lately added a feature via DebugInfoD. You might use that partly with our unstable branch, as you have to be as close as possible with your packages to Arch upstream. Manjaro on the other hand would need to establish some for our branches, which might not happen in near future at all. On ARM side the debug packages are simply added to the main repositories, which blows needed storage space up a bit. So we can distribute those packages there but might loose some mirrors in that remark. Also most Arch-based issue reports are based on Manjaro - based on popularity I guess. And since developers love their debug symbols those bug reports without them are mostly garbage for trace the issue in code base, hence Manjaro issues might be lower prioritized based on that. You may want to reproduce it on pure Arch and send in with debuginfod enabled …
KDE has more or less a 3 step cycle of development: Feature release, Feature release, Polish release. So 5.24 was a release to polish the user experience based on the past feature releases before it. Also since Kubuntu and Suse is using it 5.24 might be more stable than others. 5.25 was more or less a new set of new stuff getting added, which you can also read in the announcement. So holding it back on our end on stable branch gave us some entry in KDE reddit. Since we did that I reported issues after updates of frameworks directly as it was not known upstream that Manjaro is still on 5.24 back then.
Also you can’t please everyone. If you hold back a DE release based on some issues few might have you will loose other users who want to have the new features. If the new release is too buggy noone is happy about it. So you have to find a middle way. Since most of us use either Laptops or one Monitor, those hard desktop use cases like Multi-Monitor-Support is really low prioritized on our end during testing and even on upstream with development, as there also Laptops are the main focus.
Some might have noticed the little handheld some talk about. Well the company behind it froze Arch since January 2022. So we have Plasma 5.23.5 and Frameworks 5.90.0 there. So you have a really static base and you only update Kernels, Mesa and Audio-Stack. I totally get that. As a company you want to have a static base and work only on the features you want to prioritize on your product and use the DE as a solid base. When there will be an update to Plasma and Frameworks I don’t now as that would mean to either get a newer snapshot from Arch or start to compile your own packages. But there is always flatpaks to get newer software at least to sort out some issues.
So the only way to improve Plasma and opensource in general is a good communication with all participants and report issues as best as possible upstream. Those me too posts in a random forum like here doesn’t help at all. KDE developers have no time to look at downstream distro forums. Some have accounts and do, but not all. So if more than one person have the same issue, simply add more information on existing issue reports to make them more heavy in demand to be fixed. In the end the development is community driven. More people spending their free time to work on a project the better. And you don’t have to be a developer to do that.
Even testing early software or switching to testing and unstable branches here also helps. Then you hit the issues first before the stable branch users do. If you report and get into a dialog with upstream developers those issue might get fixed before we ship them to everyone else. And if some is really broken then speak up and explain why it is better to have some more stable as in stability than fancy new features …