For what it's worth, I've been using it on prod boxes for 6 years now and I've never even thought about release cadence, so I don't think the average user has to know or care.

There's a difference between an upstream release cadence and a distributions update interval.

Ie, You don't check what the latest version of the kernel is, you trust your distribution to package a version and apply relevant patches.

This is the main purpose of a Linux distribution, to take away the stress of tracking every project it uses.

> forces its users to track a release schedule

Quick, what's your version and the release cadence of: top, bash, coreutils, systemd? It's very likely you don't know, don't care and just get them with the distribution. Nobody's forcing users to care about this either.

It's going to be the same amount of change but delivered one at a time. What matters is how disruptive they are in aggregate, not when they happen.

> It's also a tacit admission that they have a QA process that is dogshit and simply expect users to catch bugs

Since when did we expect OSS to have QA process that is not the users ? It's telling that the co-opting of OSS by business led to this expectation that OSS is something to consume rather than participate in.