I don't think there's anything good or insightful in Linus' approach to version numbers. I think he just doesn't care about it at all, and so why not have some fun.
In my view version numbers either have a significance (semver & co.) or just get rid of it and use something derived from a date. Because why is it 5.19 then 6.0 and not sqrt(2) and tomorrow we try negative numbers?
No software depends on a specific kernel version number, thankfully, so as a sysadmin I'd rather have Linux 2022.5.2 (year.sequential-number.patch) than 5.19. Possibly unpopular idea since I get bashed every time I criticize Linux and its versioning, as if I shouldn't dare question it.
That's an interesting perspective. I am also a sysadmin and I sometimes care about the kernel I run (I run the Zen kernel on my XPS running Arch), but I also don't really find much value in the version number unless it has a feature I need/want. Like you, it wouldn't add or detract for me to know that a feature I want is in kernel 5.19 vs version 2022.5.2.
Huh, although, the one question I'm not sure about would be LTS releases. For some reason -- in my head, at least -- it feels unorganized to mark a version based on date as an LTS. I guess Ubuntu does that and it doesn't bother me but for some reason I have a double standard with the kernel.
Tangent: is there an official timeline where the decided support lifetime for the kernel versions are? Something like Ubuntu's lifecycle table[1]? I ask because there was one time I was gonna run 5.10 but wasn't sure when it was EOL because Greg K H was going to shorten it but then decided to extend it.
Kernels in LTS releases are already weird. A RHEL kernel might have version 5.6 yet it's been released today with a ton of backports on top of a kernel that's years old.
In my view version numbers either have a significance (semver & co.) or just get rid of it and use something derived from a date. Because why is it 5.19 then 6.0 and not sqrt(2) and tomorrow we try negative numbers?
No software depends on a specific kernel version number, thankfully, so as a sysadmin I'd rather have Linux 2022.5.2 (year.sequential-number.patch) than 5.19. Possibly unpopular idea since I get bashed every time I criticize Linux and its versioning, as if I shouldn't dare question it.