I went to see what the big changes were to justify a new major version number and saw:<p>“The numbering change is not indicative of anything special. If you want to have an official reason, it's that I ran out of fingers and toes to count on, so 4.21 became 5.0”<p>I laughed out loud.
I actually prefer a date-based approach to release naming. Given continuous flow of kernel development, I would advocate for releasing a major every year, a minor every month, and patches as needed. Gives you better indication of how much behind you are by just looking at the version.
Some annoying amdgpu bugs were fixed for Vega users (like one affecting DisplayPort 1.2 monitors with REG_WAIT timeout / dce110_stream_encoder_dp_blank error).<p>* <a href="https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/drivers/gpu/drm/amd/display/dc/core/dc_link.c?h=v5.0-rc1&id=8c9d90eebd23b6d40ddf4ce5df5ca2b932336a06" rel="nofollow">https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...</a>
Newer projects have quick version bumps after the success of Chrome's accelerated versioning approach.<p>But for software deeper in solutions, fast version changes appear confusing. I like Apache, nginx with very small bumps. Most newer JS frameworks live fast and die quick. It's also very confusing for developers to decide to jump to newer versions.<p>Expecting 11.20 version around 2037.
I'm still contrary to all those drivers additions that are being made, slowing the compile time.<p>Why don't they get rid of old drivers (say, prior to 2000)?<p>It would make the kernel slimmer for sure. They could made optional and one has to self compile the kernel to enable them
IMHO, Linux is failing us, end users.<p>It works great for servers, I can give it that. There it mostly runs on a very narrow set of hardware, or just VMs. It is stable and performant, and customizable.<p>But not on consumer devices. I'd like to use it eventually, but the state of driver support is still abysmal. Android phones lose support after a couple of years, and on desktop/laptops there are numerous problems too. I think that situation is caused by the lack of stable driver API.<p>Now that's what I'll be looking forward to for 6.0.