Linux kernel 6.12 has been released

There's no minor and major. All releases are equivalent but the first number is bumper when the second becomes large enough, which happens every 2-3 years.

In fairness, that is a weird versioning scheme, and I really do wish that Linux either switched to full semver (in which case it'd be version 2.9000.0 or so by now) or just drop the leading digit and go full build number kinda like NT does. But as cousin comments note, not my project not my call:)

I like qemu's version scheme were the major version increases every year (since version 4.0). So x.1 the first release in a year and you can see from a quick glance how "old" a version is.

I would think most if not all of the enterprise distros would object as generally they lock their kernel versions for the duration of a "release" lifecycle and backport security fixes from newer kernels to the version they chose.

They wouldn't want users thinking they were still using a "2024" kernel in 2032, for example, when they have 10+ years of support to provide.

Note that the world would be significantly better if entreprise distros stopped doing that and just shipped the latest kernel. I understand freezing user space because most developers don’t care about shipping stable software and break compatibility all the time but the kernel takes its pledge to never break user space very seriously.

The backporting is very much hit and miss.

The one difference is that in at least some cases RHEL freezes things to provide a stable kernel ABI - https://access.redhat.com/solutions/444773