Wish to confirm usage of stable branch. Experts may please help

My goal is to confirm usage of stable branch of Manjaro KDE Plasma. I have following output from terminal commands,

sudo pacman-mirrors --status  :heavy_check_mark:
contains following output
Local mirror status for stable branch

cat /etc/os-release  :heavy_check_mark:
contains following output
NAME=“Manjaro Linux”
PRETTY_NAME=“Manjaro Linux”
BUILD_ID=rolling

I am confused by rolling word in BUILD_ID. And wish to confirm usage of stable branch. Experts may please help.

pacman-mirrors -G

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pacman-mirrors -G

… will tell you which branch you’re on.

Manjaro is indeed a rolling-release distribution, which means that instead of installing fixed-point releases every six months to a year — as with distributions like Ubuntu, Mint, Debian, RedHat, et al — you install Manjaro only once and you keep it updated. The updates will always put you on the latest release.

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You are on stable. Manjaro is a rolling release. It updates relatively quickly, the packets are tested a couple of weeks on unstable and testing and then fixed and pushed to stable.

The only difference between stable and unstable is in the mirror file which tells which versions of the packets are you served. There is no other indicator besides pacman-mirrors.

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Note the:

Do not skip updates, as that will leave you in an unsupported, partially-updated state.

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Thank one and all. I was confused only because word ‘stable’ was absent in sudo pacman-mirrors --status

From replies of expert, I think pacman-mirrors -G
results in output ‘Stable’ which is an authoritative source.

Thank you. :slightly_smiling_face:

pacman-mirrors --status only gives you the status of the mirrors in your saved mirror list. Those mirrors are the same between Stable, Testing and Unstable. They are only the servers containing the packages. :wink:

Switching between branches is also always a conscious decision — it does not happen haphazardly. After installing Manjaro, you are always on the Stable branch, and if you want to switch to Testing or Unstable, then you need to explicitly do this via pacman-mirrors. Furthermore, switching branches requires superuser privileges, so you cannot just accidentally do it without realizing what you’ve done.

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Just running pacman-mirrors does the job of reporting the status as well as the branch:

OK means it’s good to go before the update… you only need to add flags if you want less information.

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