Linux 5.20 Likely To Be Called Linux 6.0

[coder]

It would be nice if these major version bumps would introduce some long postponed breaking changes

Agreed, except for the "breaking" part. Linux always has maintained a policy of not breaking userspace, except when there's a really good reason. And such reasons tend to be related to security or correctness, which should not be postponed.

instead of the allways backwards-compatible with the past things.

Heh, it's only "always backwards-compatible" from a userspace perspective. I don't know how much of a limitation that is on kernel developers, but I'd say it's generally a good thing.

Inside the kernel, they're making incompatible changes all the time.

[dlq84]

I think Torvalds should adopt the same version number scheme as Firefox and Chrome. For no other reason than I enjoy people whining about high version numbers on this forum.

[piorunz]

YY.MM versioning would be easy and useful. Like Ubuntu does. Or YY.version. Bitcoin does that. Latest version of Bitcoin Core is called 23.0. Easy. Next Linux could be called 23.06 (Year, Month) or 23.0, 23.1 and so on (versioning).

[ClosedSource]

Why not just 6.0, 7.0, 8.0, etc...?
Stable trees could be 6.1, 6.2, etc.. instead of 5.15.200, 5.15.201...

[coder]

YY.MM versioning would be easy and useful. Like Ubuntu does. Or YY.version. Bitcoin does that. Latest version of Bitcoin Core is called 23.0. Easy. Next Linux could be called 23.06 (Year, Month) or 23.0, 23.1 and so on (versioning).

Neither of these examples have a lot of stable, long-lived branches. Try looking for more relevant examples.

[NotMine999]

It would be nice if these major version bumps would introduce some long postponed breaking changes instead of the allways backwards-compatible with the past things.

So you would like Linux to be more like Windoze Vista or Windioze 10 or 11 perhaps?

[nomadewolf]

What will Linus do when we reach Linux 20?...

[erniv2]

What will Linus do when we reach Linux 20?...

One point release every 2 months 19*2*14/12 = 44.3, 44 years in the future he will probably sit in some retirement home or turn over in his grave because someone messed up linux shortly after he left it to someone else, i wonder if he has written a will, to decide what will happen to linux.

[coder]

What will Linus do when we reach Linux 20?...

Just add another field, I guess.

Super.Major.Minor.Patch

[uxmkt]

Just add another field, I guess.

Super.Major.Minor.Patch

Ah but the "." operator has a left-to-right associativity, you can't just prefix it with something and expect a logical end result. In other words, going from "19.19" to "1.0.0" would go against the natural ordering most people and parsers have come to expect. You'd have to change the name... think of it like going from quake3-1.32 to quake4-1.0.4.0, that might work.