Honestly, that doesn’t sound good for the future at all…
A valid concern, and something that hope alone won’t cure. The sooner a system can be put in place to generate revenue for that kind of hiring, the better, and yet, there are those who complain bitterly any time such a solution is proposed.
Many seem to forget they are receiving an OS for nothing – gratis – free – especially newer users direct from the world of fruit and portals – although, more established users can sometimes be equally as callus in their opinions.
The last substantial uptate for Stable branch was 2021-09-26, as the Update Announcement shows:
To always be aware of when these updates occur it’s recommended to check the announcements regularly. If that’s too difficult a task, one can also add .rss to the end of the URL and add it to a feed reader.
Example:
https://forum.manjaro.org/c/announcements/stable-updates/12.rss
As mentioned, an option to switch branches (to Unstable or Testing) exists if the need for updated packages is urgent. Switching branches is likewise an option to workaround the apparent FOMO experienced by some.
The business idea for the gaming console with the immutable manjaro version was good, and at that time the manjaro console was one of the first on the market. Nowadays steamdeck and asus rog are competing in the scene and it is harder.
We need a fresh idea. A sustainable model. Other than donations, which generate a couple of thousand bucks pro year from a couple of million users of the distro worldwide. Cause those are, very roughly speaking, the numbers. 1000 users donate $1 altogether.
same need that for handling pdf
If it’s a really desperate need, there’s always the option of grabbing the source (probably from github) and building it yourself.
nah that to much of a hassle, aby pdf is the other option but try to not use corpos tools when can
If repository updates are not released soon, stable branch users might have problems building AUR packages if a dependency needs updating
The “Known Issue” for Gnome 49 probably needs more information for stable branch users
We may update stable in about two weeks when Kernel 6.18 gets officially released …
A valid concern.
Although, to minimise the likelihood of such problems it’s generally recommended to switch to Unstable branch, in any case. Naturally, this doesn’t suggest that many actually pay any attention to that recommendation.
To be fair, I never had any real problems - except that an AUR package might stop working, and the only available update is unable to build on Stable - so that problem can be temporarily fixed with a temporary switch (usually Testing is adequate). This only really affected me severely with the big pacman update some time ago with paru not working.
Hey all, how far along is the testing phase in transitioning to the stable phase? Will there be an update in the next few days?
Note the comment from @philm (above).
Beyond that, all that can be offered is: “It will be ready when it’s ready”.
Regards.
The way you phrase that make it sound very worrisome. Is there a real danger in the short term for the development of Manjaro to stall? Do you have some plan to go forward? I know you were working on the immutable Manjaro, but I don’t know how is it going and is it going to be any help. Is there anything the Manjaro community can do to help?
@cfinnberg let’s say it is complicated…
I think Manjaro is the best daily driving distribution for many years. It’s a distribution that just works. You can see a bunch of archbased distributions, have you tried them? There is a problem with dependencies, the graphics system is not working after the update, and there is no offline installer… That’s just the first thing that came to mind. I’m interested in many of the concepts that are emerging. CachyOS, like ALHP, are interesting because they provide packages compiled with the -O3 and -lto flags. According to my calculations, this gives up to 5% performance on average(v3, without AVX512), excluding games, but also adds a lot of instability, graphical artifacts and heavy debugging. NixOS is interesting for its declarative approach. It’s good if you’re smart and you have a lot of time to make your perfect configuration, which still won’t fit another one (at least not yet).
But no matter what I try, no matter what I experiment on, I’ve been staying with Manjaro for many years. When updating the system, I am not worried that it will stop loading due to incompatible dependencies, the new version of nvidia\plasma\mutter, etc… I know for sure that if my new job with new pc\laptop has problems with the Internet for any reason, I will not look awkward and calmly install Manjaro offline. For some reason, many people do not know that they can safely use Manjaro Testing if they need fresh packages, which I have been using for many years. There is a stupid website that says “look, many years ago the developers forgot to renew the ssl certificate!”. If there was such a website for every distribution\software, would we still be sitting on Windows, thinking that Linux is something weird?
I am grateful to all the people who create open source software, especially the developers, maintainers and contributors of Manjaro Linux. This is a huge amount of work done. If Manjaro is gone tomorrow, I just don’t know what I’m going to do. Will I use btrfs with snapshots and cross my fingers before updating? Believe me, you will lose a lot of time and effort in practice. Anyone who has been using Manjaro for many years probably knows how good it is.
For a couple of years I assumed Manjaro branches would work like described in its wiki.
This made (and still makes) perfect sense to me. I never used vanilla Arch and one of the reasons why i chose Manjaro was I sensed an issue with maintaining an Arch installation - how to update? First it’s annoying to get updates on a daily basis, second regardless of what update procedure you choose (like daily, or each weekend or once per month) it all comes down to not knowing what you’ll end up with. I sort of knew this already coming from Opensuse’s Tumbleweed which is similar in rolling except the updates are a little more batched so not each day more like each other day - and the fact i can repair a system (sometimes) doesn’t really make it a hobby of mine.
As a sidenote Opensuse announced a variation of Tumbleweed named Slowroll aiming at updating once per month with fast tracked security updates (so roughly what Manjaro stable was in practise so far) already in 2023 and in two years time they managed to get this into beta stage - and this is a somewhat larger company than Manjaro - just saying - and they also earn some money, don’t they?
Anyway, only doing snapshots from Arch stable (plus the necessary modifications and additions), then having this snapshot on testing for a few days and, if the thumbs are up, moving forward to stable doesn’t sound like too much effort. And sure, two times a year you update/create some installation ISO from stable, give it a fancy name together with a fake version number for PR purposes. This doesn’t look all so complicated.
However, it isn’t done like so.
Testing isn’t a snapshot of unstable to begin with and stable is treated somehow as it would be a point release waiting for specific versions of desktop environments and kernels. This is complicated indeed and updating everything else in the system undermines the idea of why you would undergo these complications required for a real point release.
Also i think it’s hard to assume most folks would perceive Manajaro as point release distribution. I mean if i’m fine getting a Plasma update after 6 months i had chosen Fedora. Had i wanted something really stable i had chosen Debian or Ubuntu LTS.
In the end folks will always choose what serves their needs best even if they waste some time with complaining before moving on 
What about Roman Gilg? Has he already left the project?
More or less. He reduced the time he spends on the manjaro project.
He’s still with us, but he’s less active these days. 
So if some are less active and others are active but without knowing for how long… should we have to be worried about the future of Manjaro? 