5.23.3 release was pushed today, and many distros already got 5.23 so what is holding stable branch from getting it ?
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AFAIK It’s buggy. That’s why so many fixes are being released in such a short time.
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That’s not true, it has the bugs that usually appears after a new version.
If you look at the KDE releases schedule, and you will see that typically after the initial release there are three quick releases and two more delayed until the next big one:
https://community.kde.org/Schedules/Plasma_5#Future_releases
Regards. 
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I’ve got my own opinion on this, and nobody has to like it, but it’s my opinion.
I’m of opinion, and the same was true for the Gnome 40 release, that if you want something sooner and faster, you don’t want Manjaro. Because Manjaro is a curated rolling release. Which means the software you use gets tested and configured before coming to you. Making sure it’s stable and doesn’t mess up your system.
I’m of opinion that if you want something bleeding edge and not cutting edge, then go get it with a bleeding edge distro. Nobody’s stopping you.
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I’m curious why there hasn’t been an update to the stable channel in almost a month… Is there anywhere I can go to see what issues are holding it back or what testing still needs to be done?
Try and remember most of the manjaro team are volunteers and do this in their spare time and just for the love of linux. Sometimes updates are slow because there are bugs the team want to fix Sometimes it’s just down to not having the free time to do it. Real life and real jobs will come first
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Is there a public issue tracker or something?
That was the reason I changed to stable-staging branch.
I read the point that fast doesnt mean instable and old stable. Update bring fixes. At some point the system can be overtested so that the update is old then and some packages doesn’t work then. Too high widespreading of versions leads to incompatibilities which makes the system instable the most (e g. themes).
At least in the forum there is the tendency that the update is mostly stable, there is no perfect code.
I think the big issue here is intransparancy. No roadmap, no open issues/points.
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To answer the question it will be released to stable when it’s stable enough.You can also check branch compare and if your like me and a lot of others just switch to the unstable branch and you’ll have the latest as it moves from Arch stable .
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Just one little remark: some people think we have some QA team but we don’t (at least for now). So our testing is mostly using unstable as a daily driver and looking on upstream and ArchLinux’ bugtrackers and our unstable update announcements comments. We typically wait some time (2-3 weeks) to catch all issues people could face and after that do an update.
And also we try to fit new major releases to new major DE updates for both KDE and GNOME as they are releasing quite closely to each other. Now we have GNOME 41 released in Arch recently and maybe it’s worth it to wait for it’s issues to be shown but I’m not 100% sure and it’s better to ask Manjaro GNOME devs.
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Well, I think most people here are confused why the stable-staging to stable step is taking so long. It s okay to test before stable, but in lot of peoples’ understanding stable-staging is in fact stable.
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I’m on Stable Branch, and I’ve got to admit that to a certain extent you do have a point. Not to criticise for the sake of it, needless to say, but I’ve wondered whether Stable Staging Branch is widely used at the end of the day?
Otherwise, my system is running just fine, and it’s not the first time that updates have been somewhat longish. During the first major lock-down (dunno if anyone here remembers?) updates were few and far between save for important security ones. And my system didn’t pop at the seams…this current install is over2 years old already and still going strong - just goes to show! 
Stable-Staging is a developer branch. With the current server management tool Boxit we can’t hold packages back from a snap we do from one branch to the other. So I added a 4th layer to be able not to bother Testing branch users when I suddenly downgrade packages, push some packages etc before I do a stable snap.
Most of our paid developers are heavily into Pinephone and PinephonePro work. Also the new project Plasma Bigscreen we mostly focus on. All of those is ARM related, so why bother, we are talking about x64 here. Well, same team members doing also ARM and that is the part of Manjaro we mostly get our income with.
This however doesn’t mean that the Desktop branch is forgotten. We have hardware partners with Starlabs, Tuxedo and others which rely on our Desktop version also. So we have to make sure all is working on their hardware first. Most of our team are using hardware by those vendors to test them faster. Additionally we will launch devices by Beelink, which we also test.
Our community developers have really less time to also maintain the release schedule, so mostly company developers jump in to do that after work hours.
Most users using Stable branch are happy that the update cycle slowed down and they can enjoy a more static release. AUR users might not be so happy as some already adopted to newer versions on Arch, which AUR is following.
In the end we are all here and still support Manjaro, trying to make it better. But we only have so much hours we can spend on Manjaro.
To communicate better to the wider user community we added Mark (@Yochanan) to act as the Community Manager, so the user community has a contact to reach out to our community and company developers.
We will also work on release schedules for the upcoming Qonos release, we might have before X-Mas. It will ship with Plasma 5.23 and Gnome 41 plus latest XFCE. Kernel will be 5.15 LTS plus latest Xorg/Wayland stack. For proprietary Nvidia drivers we will have 390xx, 470xx and latest 495 series. So either CW46 or the week after we may have our first preview and therefore another stable snap.
So I strongly recommend to switch branches if you can’t wait and help debuging and testing for regressions a stable branch user should not have.
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If you want v5.23.3 of plasma-desktop now you could switch to unstable branch
Manjaro - Branch Compare- plasma-desktop
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Casual user checking in. I’ve had the same install on my main desktop for over 3 years. In all that time, the only issues I’ve encountered are occasionally needing to reboot from terminal after a major update, and very rarely a freeze requiring a hard shutdown. I greatly appreciate the commitment to keeping the Stable branch rock solid. I would think that an important part of growing and maintaining a user base is providing a main version that can be operated and enjoyed by people of any experience level. I realize KDE attracts users that are very interested in new features and improvements. I also look forward to the new version, but for my needs, the 2-4 week wait is a reasonable compromise for trusting that my computer will work flawlessly %99.9999 of the time. That is the main reason I’ve stayed w/ Manjaro, and I hope it will remain available for many years to come. Thanks to the teams that make this possible!
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Or… just use the unstable or testing repo…? Manjaro unstable = Arch Stable. If you want the newest asap, use unstable repo.
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Manjaro is the first and ONLY operating system that has lasted more than 6 months with me. So yeah, it’s an absolute winner, no doubt!
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Thanks for your hard work. I just want to point to one major problem that makes Manjaro not suitable for reporting detailed bugs which is the absence of debug symbols, I recall I asked a question on KDE reddit why not make KDE Neon version based on Arch derivative and officially support it, the response was that Arch doesn’t come with debug symbols and you should compile the whole plasma git packages with them symbols enabled.
I have switched to Testing several times in the past when for some reason I didn’t want to wait for a update to Stable (be it due to Plasma updates or bugs in Stable). Eventually I would switch back to Stable, when it had caught up.
Usually your system will not explode from doing so - just wait a day or to to see what other users report and then decide if you would prefer waiting or switching branches.
Btw. - Plasma release schedule is following a Fibbonaci sequence (1,1,2,3,5…weeks) for bugfix-releases, frequency is always the same (amount of bugs might vary, of course).
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In response to “transparency” and “a list”, aren’t the various announcement lists the place for user’s to go to stay informed.
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