I never bothered to figure out if Ubuntu kept parts of the name between the 16.04 and the 16.10 version, or if they just used the next letter in the alphabet.

The iso images are numbered (ubuntu-server-16.04.02-x64.iso or whatever) thankfully, so i have 4 ubuntu templates - "leaving LTS this year", the next two LTS, and whatever the 9 month version is currently (20.10 being the current 9 month version)

Thankfully qemu/docker/lxc have made "freezing" a stable, working machine at 16.04 (or even 14.04 if you had the foresight to set it up on qemu at least) - but now i have tons of naming issues. We use a pooled hypervisor system, so sometimes i name things after which pool "server" they are on because i will spin two vms on different servers in the pool with the same VM name (say asterisk-voip) but when you log in it will say asterisk-pve2 or asterisk-wok3 as a quick "hint" as to when i actually "finished" installing it.

for DNS i only name stuff when an "app" requires it either for TLS/SSL or whatever reason. I don't maintain a real DNS server anywhere, and i really should, but i don't like naming things for literally all of the reasons hashed over by everyone in this thread!

Everything in our system is named <purpose><number>.<location>, but that is because everything is set up automatically by provisioning systems that way. We have thousands of servers in hundreds of data centers, so it the only time you ever go to a particular machine is to debug something.

I like software version numbers too. The names blur (is lion before or after leopard...)

But Genes and Stars are different In my mind because they are names pointing to separate things. Though they are numbered in order of discovery....