why is it like this?

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Mac OS: Cat, Dog, Cow, Panther, Some California park, your uncles house

Everything should be date-based name releases.

If it’s released April, 2023 it should be 23.04 or similar.

Other schemes are arbitrary.

Change my mind.

Even the old dog did it:

In 1999, Slackware saw its version jump from 4 to 7. Slackware version numbers were lagging behind other distributions, and this led many users to believe it was out of date even though the bundled software versions were similar. Volkerding made the decision to bump the version as a marketing effort to show that Slackware was as up-to-date as other Linux distributions, many of which had release numbers of 6 at the time. He chose 7, estimating that most other distributions would soon be at this release number.

I'll likely call it 6.0 since I'm starting to worry about getting confused by big numbers again.

~ Linus Torvalds

Poor Windows NT.

And there is OpenSUSE: 10 11 12 13 42 15

Because in the end a "version number" is just part of the name. You can call it anything you want.

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Juking the version number was trendy there for a while. It happened to browser versions to. Firefox and Chrome went from like version 10 to 100.

It's like that because KDE is based on Qt. On 🪟, It's because they don't care, and on GNOME, it's for aesthetic reasons.

Even stranger is the windows 8 and 8.1 part since this is the one and only time a service pack changed the name of the OS.

See also the Doom numbering system: Ultimate, 2, 64, Final, 3, (2016), Eternal.

Windows 95, 98, me were kernel version 4.0+

Windows 2000 was kernel 5.0

XP and Vista were 6.0 and 6.1

Windows 10 had to be called that because the naming convention used on Windows 95/98 caused someware to see the OS as version 9.x

Gnome 40/41/etc is still 3.40/3.41/etc if I remember correctly

41>10>5

GNOME is clearly the best

Also Firefox, please stop

Because KDE is boring. /s

Basically, they were doing 3.15, 3.16, etc but they decided to turn it into whole numbers. It was currently 3.19 so they decided to go from 3 to 4.0, and remove the decimal.

Latex:

"It's 34 versions ahead of cinnamon" -GNOME devs probably