LogInGoing forward, Blender will feature three updates per year instead of four.
The Blender Foundation has recently unveiled the release schedule for Blender 4.0, an upcoming release of the company's open-source 3D software, announcing their plans to move from four yearly releases to three.
According to a blog post shared by the team, the format of four full-fledged updates per year will soon be replaced with a new one featuring only three yearly releases, based on the experience of developers and users following this schedule over the past years. The proposed schedule is set to extend the software's Bcon1 and Bcon2 phases, better align with annual events and holidays, and give users more time to test out the current versions of Blender.
As per the new schedule, 2023 will be used as a transition period, with the upcoming Blender 4.0 expected to be released in late November. The company noted that the new plan only comes into effect with 4.0 and won't affect Blender 3.6, set to be released in July as an LTS version, and Blender 3.5, a soon-to-be-released update that recently entered beta.
"The goal is to have a new LTS release every year, supported for two years (just as it is currently, but released around the same time of the year), and a major version and breaking release every 2 years (3.0, 4.0, 5.0…)," commented the devs. "We hope this new schedule will give developers more time to code, users more time to test, and ease the maintenance of tools by studio TDs and add-on developers."
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