Fresh vs stable channels for the release?
This came up during a recent Neon meeting. We were talking about Neon's editions (Unstable, Testing, and User) and how these target different kinds of people based on their level of adventurousness.
But we also realized that there's a fourth group we left out: the kind of user who wants relatively up-to-date KDE software, but not bleeding edge. A person who wants Plasma 6, but maybe not 6.0.0 on day 1.
The problem being solved here is that no matter how much beta testing we get, our crowd of beta testers is orders of magnitude smaller than real users. No matter how much QA and beta testing Plasma releases undergo, we seem unable to avoid the problem of real-world users encountering unforeseen issues due to the vast diversity of usage scenarios. So we can let people who are okay with a bit of instability use "fresh" Plasma releases according to the Plasma release schedule, while people who want a bit more stability would use the "stable" channel and get the Plasma 6 upgrade only with 6.0.3, a month after the adventurous users have reported all the obvious issues and they've already gotten fixed. THereafter they'd get the 6.0.4 and 6.0.5 releases when everyone else does.
This is relevant for Neon which could create "Fresh" and "Stable" editions to cater to these preferences, but it got me thinking about whether it might make sense to pitch the idea to other distros too, or even somehow build it into Plasma's own releases.
cc @sitter @jriddell @davidedmundson and maybe other distro maintainers might also be interested in the topic?