Okay - some huge Blender news was announced today and it will take a little bit of explaining.
First, one small thing - the much-hyped Cloth Brush has officially been added to the 2.83 alpha build. And all reports are, it works beautifully! 2.83 is expected to be released this spring; but here's where the big news begins.
Blender 2.83, when it comes out, will be the first edition of Blender that will have something called LTS, or "long term support". This idea might be familiar to people who have used Linux builds, like Ubuntu. Just by way of example, a new version of Ubuntu comes out like every six months; and that may be okay for an average user to keep up with, but for something like a business with lots of computers...well from a system administration standpoint it's like just not practical to upgrade your OS company-wide every six months. So Ubuntu has this thing where a new "LTS version" comes out every 2 years, and as a business, you get that version, and you just keep it for the next two or three or more years, I believe Ubuntu supports LTS versions up to five years - but anyway, so while you won't be getting any new features or upgrades or anything like that, Ubuntu has promised to provide bug fixes and security patches for these particular versions of the OS for the length of the LTS period. Other new versions of Ubuntu keep getting released every six months of course, but you ignore them until you finally decide to upgrade to the newest LTS version.
Blender has decided it might be a good idea to do the same thing. The dramatic improvements that came with 2.8x have attracted industry interest, but with new versions with crazy new features coming out every couple months, potential users like large production studios aren't going to want to start working on a year-plus-long project with the latest Blender edition only for it to be more or less left behind in three or four months. So similar to Ubuntu and other companies, every so often Blender wants to declare a given new build to be an LTS version, which will be "feature frozen" but still continue to get fixes and support for the next while - right now, the Blender Foundation is thinking roughly 2 years. So the big players with the long-term projects can confidently use whatever version they start with for the whole project. And in the meantime of course, the rest of the Blender user base can still get the regular updates with the new and more "experimental" features in them which will continue to come out at the same pace.
So, 2.83 will be the first LTS version of Blender. Once it comes out, if you're a weird person who is tired of the constant barrage of minor changes and new features and would rather stick with a single version for a while, just get 2.83, and rest assured that it will continue to get nothing but bug fixes and stuff like that.
So I guess the next logical question is, why will 2.83 be the first LTS version? What's so special about it? Well, it might be easy to guess that "well it's simply the next version, and they've just now decided to start doing this", but that's not the real reason, and the real reason is Big News #2: Blender 2.83 will be the LAST 2.8x Blender version.
That's right: Blender 2.83 comes out this May; and the next build that comes out this August will be 2.90. Yes BLENDER 2.9 IS COMING OUT THIS SUMMER. Blender 2.7 was released in 2014, and it took five years to finally arrive at 2.8, which came out last summer - July of 2019. And yet 2.8x will only have been around for ONE YEAR when we move to 2.9 this coming August.
And that's not it either. Blender 2.9 is also slated for only a year's worth of development, expected only to reach 2.93 before, NEXT summer, in August of 2021, BLENDER 3 WILL BE RELEASED. What the heck is going on????
Well it's just the case that the speed of development has vastly increased. The Blender Development Fund was an enormous success and the combination of individual donation and corporate grants has given the foundation enough to hire some 12 or more full-time developers and they're turning out new stuff like it's raining code because improving Blender is their whole actual job now. Features that it was assumed would be coming out in a few years are coming out in a couple of months. If the pace of new announcements and new releases has seemed frenetic over the last year, that's because it absolutely has been.
Which means that the next "big" Blender step will be coming out in just a few months; there's just no time to go through more little incremental releases. DO NOT WORRY, the change from 2.8 to 2.9 will not be even remotely like the shock overhaul of the switch between 2.7x and 2.8. There will really only be one huge new feature set to learn - particles. Blender 2.9 will feature a new node-based particle system, replacing the current particle system which hasn't been updated in many years. And of course there will be other little changes and improvements - the odd new brush or UV functionality maybe - but nothing like having to learn a whole new interface and a new menu layout and all this. It's possible you might not even notice any changes at all, if all you do is model stuff for use in Second Life.
If the new Particle Nodes is the big thing that justifies jumping from 2.83 straight to 2.9, what in the world awaits us next year when we jump from 2.93 to 3.0? Right now, this isn't quite known; at least, it hasn't been announced. If you've been following Blender development for a while, there's some possibilities; sometime in the near future, an overhauled animation system (also node-based, or at least partly so) is planned, and that will be particularly huge. A new internal asset manager is also planned - it will allow you to create a "library" of models, materials, textures and what not that will be a little easier to use and better organized than having to dig through your file browser to import these things with each new project. Maybe these will be part of Blender 3. Who knows? What we do know is that once 3.0 comes out, the numbering system will proceed at a more "normal" software versioning pace - the next build after 3.0 will be 3.1, not 3.01.
So, that's the big news. Damn the torpedoes and all that, looks like.