I don’t want to dismiss other people’s issues but just to give an alternate experience, I have been on 6.12 since it’s release and 6.12.3 since this morning and haven’t had any issue.
I have a setup usually prone to issues (plugged in a dock that is itself plugged in a KVM which is plugged to 3 screens) and my experience so far with 6.12 is better than previous kernels.
6.12 is not the LTS kernel. LTS is around 6.6.63 right now. I would recommend staying on LTS for the time being as the bleeding edge arch kernel has had major issues with the amd graphics for a while now. Lockups, multi-monitor issues, 3d accel not working in wayland with one monitor, sleep locks, etc. All these seem to go away on the LTS kernel.
This was announced on December 5th:
What does that have to do with the current status of Arch and the kernels it offers and labels. This is the Arch thread.
Arch, Debian, Ubuntu, Manjaro, whatever. they do not dictate LTS kernels or kernel labels. Kernel maintainters dictate LTS kernels. 6.12 is indeed an LTS kernel. It will be Long Term Supported while other kernels will be deprecated and given EOL status after some time. Maintaining a complete and special kernel for their distro would be a waste of efforts, its better to depend on kernel devs and just add out of tree modules if you want them.
As for 6.12.1 its super unstable. I expect to see 6.12.4+ as being stable considering how many patches they rammed through to fix issues as soon as 6.12 was released. I just jumped on 6.13rc1 to test since Manjaro hasn’t release anything past 6.12.1 which causes lock ups for me. So Far 6.13rc1 seems stable (only been testing for a few hours) on my FW16, and it would probably be the closeset thing to 6.12.4 without me compiling the kernel myself. Stupid bluetooth module crashes have stopped. (yeah I’m still using the MT7922 wifi module).