No updates in over a month?

Non-technical Questions
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I noticed that in nearly if not over a month now, there haven’t been any new updates in Manjaro stable. As I’m still relatively new and only been on Manjaro for over 3 months, I wanted to ask if this is a normal occurrence. Mainly because until last month, updates used to come every one or two weeks… for a rolling release it’s rare to see such a long break.

Are there bugs in the latest software causing a delay? Or did the mirrors possibly change and we may need to update our origins… I take it this option is unlikely but just making sure.

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If you have followed the #announcements:testing-updates , you could gather that there is/was some issues that keeps updates from rolling into stable branch. I seem to recall some nvidia issues at least, which would be keeping it back.

But yeah, hold ups like these happen sometimes. Not often, but sometimes.

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Testing branch used to receive updates every 2-3 days. Now it is usually 10-15 days in between testing updates.

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Summertime: vacation time… :beach_umbrella:

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You may be relatively new to Manjaro but not to Linux, if I remember correctly you were coming from SUSE but I’m not sure if you were using Leap or Tumbleweed, so if you were using the latter I guess 3 months in MJ and former experience should be sufficient by now (assuming you have read some Manjaro and Arch wikis and tinkered a bit) to switch to the testing branch which is more close to “rolling”, and more granular, as ben81 said it’s rolling every 10-15 days, which you can check from the dates in the announcements. You shouldn’t have any problems (always read the announcements), MJ Stable updates “when it’s (theoretically) ready” so it can take sometimes long. Ofc, it’s always your decision :slight_smile: .

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Yes, openSUSE Tumbleweed was my previous distribution, been on it for nearly a decade. It’s also a rolling release, with a new snapshot roughly every 3 days. I prefer Manjaro having better testing and not quite such an update frequency actually… a snapshot per week sounds good in my book.

I’ll be honest: Another reason I’m a bit impatient is that the current snapshot has a few odd bugs. Hoping new package versions will introduce some fixes to them… feels more likely than introducing new issues now. I’ll wait, hopefully new packages will be available soon.

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I found Manjaro to be a lot more stable than openSUSE Tumbleweed. Also, it drove me up a wall how many basic tasks required sudo in openSUSE. Like defragmenting files I owned as an example. In Arch/Manjaro, I can use btrfs filesystem defragment on my own files without sudo rights.

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openSUSE Tumbleweed is stable, but I think Manjaro is even more so. Password requirements for different tasks go both ways: openSUSE for example allowed you to update via the system tray as an user, on Manjaro though you need root to execute any update.

On that comparison, I think Manjaro might also be more secure than openSUSE. IIRC OS uses polykit to run some root tasks as user, which was exposed to have security vulnerabilities… here you need the root password to do an update but it’s a bit safer that way.

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I just made a little statistic with regard to all stable updates from 2018 until now:

On average, Manjaro Stable is updated every 8.78 days.

The longest times between stable updates have been 35 days (struggles to become Gnome stable in October 2019) and 36 days (which I think was due to the change to the new forum in July 2020)

The last stable update was on June 14th, so 21 days ago.

There has been a 19-day update duration from May 19th to June 7th when you were already using Manjaro.

With all that said … statistically there is nothing to worry about and the next stable update is apparently coming quite soon :slight_smile:

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It seems that stable branch has been updated to Manjaro 21.1 Pahvo. How long will it take to release the 21.1 ISO on Manjaro - Downloads?

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I switched back to the testing branch because I got tired of waiting for the stable update and needed the latest steam-native and pipewire-* packages. I think there are some problems in nvidia space that is holding things up, but I’m not sure on the details. (also the new wine doesn’t hurt, it fixes some games)

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I might be the odd one out, but I primarly choose a distro based on applications; while everything else (sudo, su, permissions, package management, administration, security quirks, etc) is secondary. It’s for this reason I settled on Manjaro for my computers.

If it wasn’t for the AUR, I would likely still be using openSUSE and/or Mint, resorting to the PackMan Repository and PPAs, respectively.

I’m not a fan of the “version freeze policy” used by Debian and distros based from it (e.g, Ubuntu, Mint), as it’s really arbitrary for most software (with exception to critical and flagship packages, such as the kernel and libraries.)

It’s not uncommon to be on a “stable” LTS version, such as Ubuntu 20.04, and be stuck with buggy software in which the upstream developers have fixed the issues, yet the package will never be in the official repositories because, heaven forbid, “version 3.0.5 is a higher number than 3.0.4!” (Even though the bug is fixed in version 3.0.5!)

How this is considered “more stable” and “safer” is beyond me. Luckily, for rolling release distros, such as Arch, Manjaro, and openSUSE Tumbleweed, you inherent upstream bugfixes (for all software, not just “crucial”) simply by keeping your system up-to-date without having to resort to PPAs, Flatpacks, abandoned repositories, and so on. (Not to mention the fact that the latest version of said application might not even exist in an official PPA!)

"The package system format (.deb, .rpm, .zst) is a moot point as long as the availability of software is within reach, such as using the AUR. There’s a good chance your package either exists in the official Manjaro / Arch repos or the AUR. Just because some websites offer an installer in .deb format, doesn’t mean Debian- and Ubuntu-based distros have the widest availability of software in the world of desktop Linux.

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I switched back to the testing branch because I got tired of waiting for the stable update and needed the latest steam-native and pipewire-* packages. I think there are some problems in nvidia space that is holding things up, but I’m not sure on the details. (also the new wine doesn’t hurt, it fixes some games)

You can see the Packages

steam-native and pipewire-* packages have no updates between branches.

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You’re responding to a post 8 (EIGHT!) days later, where there was a stable update in between:

The current state of packages in branches is not what that poster faced 8 (EIGHT!) days ago.

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