While Plasma 6.3 is badly broken for me I do want to use the more modern kernel (at least see if it might be why Kwin is crashing on every login). Unfortunately the update to Kernel 6.11 came in a giant ALL-IN-ONE update of everything. What is the best way to prevent Neon from updating plasma, but keeping the rest of the system up-to-date? I figure I will try Plasma again when 6.3.1 comes out and see if Kwin is still acting up.
Disable the neon repos, maybe? Possibly?
The kernel and OS come from Ubuntu, so are completely unrelated to neon and Plasma packaging, so it might work, but it also more likely cause other dependency issues or errors, I think. I don’t recommend it. I have no idea of any of the custom apt configs neon has in place on top of its added repo will muck around with things.
Ubuntu released the kernel a day or two before neon released Plasma 6.3, they weren’t bundled together or anything.
Actually, the safest bet would be to manually download the 6.11 packages and install those.
Let’s see:
$ apt search 6.11.0 | grep installed
...
linux-headers-6.11.0-17-generic/noble-updates,now 6.11.0-17.17~24.04.2 amd64 [installed,automatic]
linux-hwe-6.11-headers-6.11.0-17/noble-updates,noble-updates,now 6.11.0-17.17~24.04.2 all [installed,automatic]
linux-hwe-6.11-tools-6.11.0-17/noble-updates,now 6.11.0-17.17~24.04.2 amd64 [installed,automatic]
linux-image-6.11.0-17-generic/noble-updates,now 6.11.0-17.17~24.04.2 amd64 [installed,automatic]
linux-modules-6.11.0-17-generic/noble-updates,now 6.11.0-17.17~24.04.2 amd64 [installed,automatic]
linux-modules-extra-6.11.0-17-generic/noble-updates,now 6.11.0-17.17~24.04.2 amd64 [installed,automatic]
linux-tools-6.11.0-17-generic/noble-updates,now 6.11.0-17.17~24.04.2 amd64 [installed,automatic]
Doing this may well keep this kernel around instead of the usual autoremove after a few newer versions are released, since these packages were manually installed.
apt-mark can be used to change these to auto later on if needed.
Yeah, doing it manually was going to be my plan, but I wanted to see if anybody said “don’t do that!”. 
I was not sure if the kernel and desktop had any inter-dependencies. I really do not want to break the system. My enthusiasm for trouble shooting or installing new OSes has really waned these past few years.
While it may be a royal pain in the whatsis, I wonder if there is a way to mark plasma to be ignored, while everything else gets updated?
Arg… I should probably just wait. 6.3.1 should be out soon, if I recall the release cadence correctly? Yeah. I should wait.
(sorry, bit of a stream of consciousness reply).
That’s the issue: what to mark. There is a lot of stuff involved.
Normally I’d say not to do it, but manually installing the kernel packages and not updating temporarily isn’t going to break things.
Just install for example the xanmod-kernel. No problem to have 6.12.14 or 6.13.3 aside
This doesn’t solve the issue of wanting to hold back a Plasma update, though.
Happily the update to 6.3.1 appears to have solved the Kwin crash problem. I have not yet tested it fully, but at least I can log in! Kudos Neon team. I cannot tell you how happy I am not to have to find another distro. I was going to go with Arch if the Neon 6.3.1 update failed again.