A major release in February whose upgrade guide is shorter than most patch notes.
what changed, for an existing application:
the starter kits moved out of the framework
a handful of defaults in new installs
a minimum PHP of 8.2, which we exceeded
what we did:
composer require laravel/framework:^12.0
vendor/bin/phpunit
ship
elapsed: 55 minutes, most of it waiting for CI.A major that is almost nothing is either a mature framework or a stalled one, and the honest read after a year is the former — the annual cadence means a release ships when the date arrives rather than when there is something to ship. Writing down that an upgrade was trivial is worth as much as writing down that it was not, and it is the entry nobody makes.