You install of develop typically. I've been using spacemacs for 5+ years and never not used develop. https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs/commits/develop last commits was in late August.

Spacemacs is pretty mature at this stage, the modules its build on change more frequently, as you would expect.

What it amounts to is they changed their development process away from tagged releases towards a continuous delivery model on the development branch. I wish they’d just remove the old releases since it’s a constant source of confusion as to whether the project is still active.

They moved to using develop as a rolling release

https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs/issues/11191 https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs/issues/11352

i lost interest because there are too many technical burdens and making significant changes will break some people’s setup which I don’t want to do without a major release. but there’s no release at all since 2018.