why is it like this?

ill be downloading this image thank you very much
- You wouldn't download an image

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.

How would you differentiate between versions with major api breaks?
- Shhh, they don't know what that means, let them live in bliss
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.
Marketing version (23.04 or just 23) and semver (3.11.3)

Change my mind
- 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.
somehow i agree with you.
Tesla updates basically use that format, it's pretty nice imo. "year.week.revision", so for example 2023.29.3
AFAIK only Unity does this
- I've seen many projects do it, Ubuntu, KDE Applications (not Plasma itself), and Helix are the first ones that come to mind
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?

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

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".

Poor Windows NT.

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.
NT was 4.0 and the same basic operating system as 95 but with server services.
- 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.
- There was actually an NT 3.1 IIRC

And there is OpenSUSE: 10 11 12 13 42 15

If 42 is a true to Sir Terry Pratchett, then I see anothing wrong with this.
- Douglas adams.
  
  Your geek credentials have been invalidated, sir please exit the internet immediately.
The system for tumbleweed is nice. There's only one version : tumbleweed.
- From another perspective, you have a new version every few days, with the date as the version
Mulligan.

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

Minecraft 1.7.🍌
- Minebanan: now with more banan
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.
- Two words: Steve Ballmer
- Your error here is assuming sanity.
- 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.

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 1043⁶²⁴x*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.

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.

64 came after final, at least according to wikipedia
- Well now it doesn't make any dang sense.
64 < 3
- 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.

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

Lessons learned from the software masterpiece that was Solaris no doubt.
no they just decided to make 4.0 into 40
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

41>10>5

GNOME is clearly the best

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

I came here for this answer.

Also Firefox, please stop

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.

Because KDE is boring. /s

Latex:

Sweating profusely

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