Manjaro comes in three branches: stable (it’s as stable as it’ll ever be, but apps are not the most recent and updates are not as frequent), testing (interesting only if you want to contribute to Manjaro by testing the newest stuff and reporting bugs), and unstable. Unlike its name suggests, unstable seems to be stable enough to be used on a daily basis — as far as I can tell after four days of using it — but you expose yourself to occasional bugs even if I not had a single one, so far ;)
Why did I switch to unstable ? Because it’s updated more frequently, and it gives access to more recent versions of packages and apps, some of wich I wanted to use.
What’s cool is that changing branch is easy.
Switching to unstable
Open a terminal and type:
sudo pacman-mirrors --api --set-branch unstable
When it has done its stuff, do a:
sudo pacman-mirrors --fasttrack 5 && sudo pacman -Syyu
That’s it. Let your system update itself and all your apps. It’s not even sure you’ll need to reboot.
Switching back to stable
No surprise here, you do exactly the same thing replacing ‘unstable’ by ‘stable’:
sudo pacman-mirrors --api --set-branch stable
And then:
sudo pacman-mirrors --fasttrack 5 && sudo pacman -Syyu