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.