GNU as the animal or the initials, okay, sure. Debatable. Gnome is a whole-ass word. That is ridiculous.
Up there with QT insisting their name isn't Q-T. The initials are a word. If you wanted it pronounced Qute you should've called it that.
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.
Gotta know, are you serious or joking here? Follow up question: are you a developer and have you ever worked on a medium+ sized project? The amount of dependencies you end up with is astounding, you can't just "know" when all those APIs changed, that would be a full time job just to stay on top of. And that's not even taking into consideration transitive dependencies. If a library doesn't use semantic versioning, 99% of the time it's correct to avoid it just to save yourself the headache.
Semantic versioning. If I have 1.0.0 and you release 1.1.0 I can be pretty confident it's safe to update. If you release 2.0.0 I need to read the release notes and see what broke.
If I have version July2023 and you release August2023 I have no information about if it's safe to update. That's terrible. That's really bad.
This is for dependency management and maybe apis more than OSs, but in general semantic versioning is a very good system. It should be used often.
Alright I think I saw been somewhat convinced by this. But I also think the date should be included in some way.
They both serve different purposes
KDE Plasma does its versioning to follow QT versioning, which does its versioning in that way to signify API breaks.
But for something else like, say, the Linux kernel, which does not break compatibility in that manner, date-based would make more sense.
I'm partial to semver where it makes sense and date based releases where it doesn't. At my work we use <year>.<month>.<version> like 2023.7.v2 for template releases but semver for apps with APIs and such
I really like X.Y.Z
X is for major overhauls. Y is for a new individual feature added or dramatically reworked, Z is for bug fixes, updates and polish.
Like Blender is currently on 3.6. They had a dramatic major program wide overhaul a few years ago. And since then have been adding new features and reworking old ones in major 3.X releases, and occasionally have smaller updates and fixes in between, giving us 3.X.Y updates.
The only thing I don't like about that versioning system is the ambiguity that can sometimes arise due to different interpretations of what the numbers after the first dot mean.
You could either say: It's a decimal system, therefore 3.4 is bigger (comes after) 3.13. (3.4 > 3.13) or, The numbers after each dot are independent, therefore 13 is bigger than 4, so 13 is the newer release.
It's usually fairly obvious from changelings but every now and then I get tripped up.
For versioning I always viewed the numbers as independent from each other, just like with ip addresses.
I've seen many projects do it, Ubuntu, KDE Applications (not Plasma itself), and Helix are the first ones that come to mind
Tesla updates basically use that format, it's pretty nice imo. "year.week.revision", so for example 2023.29.3
I thought Linux Mint did this, but apparently they're kinda fuzzy about it? Which was not great to learn when I went to update an old laptop, and briefly thought the project had just died.
I had to type this three times because Lemmy closes the comment box and dumps whatever you had typed, if you upvote another comment while it's open. That's objectively terrible.
I had to type this three times because Lemmy closes the comment box and dumps whatever you had typed, if you upvote another comment while it's open. That's objectively terrible.
Yikes, that is terrible. What client are you using?
I'll likely call it 6.0 since I'm starting to worry about getting confused by big numbers again.
I was looking a Linus/Linux comment, I was trying to remember at what point Linus said "I'm incrementing the major version because these numbers are getting too big, there is no major advancement".
NT was a parallel line of "professional" windows. It had a different kernel or something. There were equivalent versions to most of the home releases.
The first release was NT 3.1, to match version numbers with the home OS.
NT 4 was the professional version of win 95/98.
In the year 2000 Microsoft released both Windows ME, and Windows 2000. ME for the home, 2000 was the NT release for the workplace.
The products were merged with windows XP, now all windows is windows NT.
The version numbering makes sense if you count by the NT version numbers. 2000/ME is version 5, therefore XP is 6, and if you pretend Vista never existed (as you should for your own sanity) you get to windows 7 and it all starts to make sense.
Different kernel. 95 was still DOS based. I believe a significant amount of stuff (especially drivers of course) which worked on one side didn't work on the other.
XP was the "merger" - the first NT based system for the consumer market.
XP was the “merger” - the first NT based system for the consumer market.
You're thinking of Windows 2000. Win2K was released before Windows ME, and was widely sold on consumer market computers. When ME came out, and was pretty terrible, Win2K remained as the popular consumer option.
A lot of people did use it on home computers (myself included) but the target was still businesses. XP had TV ads and colorful themes, and all that, while Windows 2000... Didn't. (Well maybe on C-SPAN or something) And the most basic (major) edition was "Professional" instead of something like "Home" as XP had.
I wouldn't be surprised if some of the big box computer makers did ship with it to home users, but it wasn't "meant" for them.
The googles tells me that Win2K was released Feb 17, 2000, and that ME was released Sep 14, 2000. Plenty of time for word to get out about how much better 2000 was than 9x even for home use.
It was also a lot more expensive than Windows 9x/me, so most consumer desktops went that way. The only people running 2000 were professionals and nerds that weren't running Linux.
Ah but in reality that wasn't entirely the case, direct X compatible drivers were a big sticking point basically until XP came along. Windows 2000 was fantastic as a productivity OS, but it wasn't fully there for the home user yet
Oh sure - the intent was for it to be a business-centric OS, it definitely was not flashy, but it was just so much better than 9x that plenty of computer makers made it available, and lots of people chose it over 98SE.
Douglas adams.
Your geek credentials have been invalidated, sir please exit the internet immediately.
•
Wait, don't they still have the option to pics or gtfo?
I move that we demand a cat tax in lieu of gtfo.
Personally I'm fine with
Pics or GTFO
Where pics are one of
- cat tax
- tits
- tasteful nudes
- a very cool piece of a collection
From another perspective, you have a new version every few days, with the date as the version
Because in the end a "version number" is just part of the name. You can call it anything you want.
That still doesn't explain why you would choose the other two instead of just counting 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 like a sane person.
Decades long projects during which time the thought on when you should change the version number and what a version number even is has changed multiple times.
They did all their bloat on one day back in 2008 and have been smooth as silk since.
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.
By 2024 firefox will be on version 1043^624^x*12^69 where x is the latest version of chrome.
I remember waiting a long time between minor versions around the 2.x versions of Firefox. And then suddenly it was major version every time.
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.
Simple, OP and some people just don't know what they are talking about. There was no "aesthetic reason".
One of the big changes in GNOME 40 (that would be 3.40) was the introduction of GTK4. People used to assume that the gnome major versioning scheme was tied to GTK, so loads of people were asking the devs when GNOME 4 was coming out.
To demistify this idea of one being tied to the other they just dropped the "3.", specially since that part wasn't that relevant and started with the 40.
People in general crave the big numbers. It's why Microsoft is so weird with Xbox naming. Having the Xbox 360 compete with the PlayStation 3 Vs "Xbox 2".
Firefox also started inflating version numbers because the high version numbers Chrome was using made it look more updated.
The real Doom 3.
I know id got on the anthology-naming thing after Quake II, but... FEAR was right there. Pick another monosyllabic name for your id-formula FPS and half the criticism would vanish.
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.
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
It would have been, but they dropped the major version, since they no longer wanted the version number to be tied to the GTK version
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.