I am not comparing the numbers in a mathematical way (I am not saying 16 is better than 7). I meant more like that packages get updates to next major versions when the OS jumps to the next major version. Somehow, I felt that Ubuntu releases new major versions more often than RHEL. But checking the release dates it seems that I was wrong.

Actually 7 is released on 2012 while 16.04 is released on 2016. You could compare 14.04 and 7 but not 16.04 and 7. Eventually you could compare CentOS 8 when it comes out this year.

No, RHEL 7 was released in June 2014, not 2012. There's no sign of RHEL 8 yet either; it would be quite surprising for it to come out this year.

https://access.redhat.com/articles/3078

> Actually 7 is released on 2012 while 16.04 is released on 2016.

Observe that that was chrisper's original very point.

Those are the current versions of each. The comparison is between the kernel versions, not the distro version numbers.

Even the kernel version isn't particularly helpful, as Red Hat is backporting new features into the version shipped by RHEL 6 and 7.

One specific example is the SO_REUSEPORT socket option which was added to Linux kernel 3.9, and was subsequently backported and became available since RHEL 6.5, which uses version 2.6.32 of the Linux kernel.[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux#Kerne...

"still at version 7" strongly implies a comparison of the distro version numbers.

No, it does not. It implies that one has been at a particular level for some time, whilst the other has only reached its current level recently. chrisper was very clearly not comparing the release numbers, as xe said. One only need read xyr prior comment in this very same thread where xe was talking about outdatedness of what is currently available.

Which reminds me of 1999 when Slackware jumped from version 4 to 7, purely to keep up with competition.