this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2024
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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I know a lot more about those topics than I ever wished I would.
Stability doesn't magically appear because you leave the version number unchanged. Stability is the result of qualified people (hint: people backporting patches in 100s of projects they barely know aren't very qualified in comparison to the main developers of those projects) making well-informed changes to a project and then testing them.
Old versions with backports are still new versions, just new versions with a smaller user base and less testing.
Stability is also much harder to achieve if you do certain tasks rarely, e.g. only every 10 years, since nobody will remember how to do them.
Upstream supports those old releases only begrudgingly because every feature that needs support across all versions in use is held back by those extremely long term support versions.
I am not objecting to the goal of stability, I am objecting to the snakeoil that pretends you can achieve it by using the same version number all the time basically with a forked branch of the code that contains cherry-picked changes.