What I mean by that is each 'major' version with stable API/ABI has a life span of about 5 years - like 5 years of 12.x version, 5 years of 13.x version, etc.
... and all that with having about only 1/10 of the Linux people count (rough estimate).
At the moment there are 12.x and 13.x. 14.x is in beta, so soon there will be three. But 12.x is expected to be dropped at the end of this year, so in 2024 it will be back to two versions.
As far as I can tell there are a lot more Linux kernels in LTS at the moment.
Not "expected", rather than that being the policy: five years is ending.
* https://www.freebsd.org/security/#sup
December 2018:
The Linux kernel has a new major release every two months, and it looks like LTS kernels are one out of every five or six major versions, so that's a new LTS kernel every 10-12 months; right now they have six LTS kernels to maintain.
Also I expect that the Linux kernel develops at a much more rapid pace than the FreeBSD kernel. That's not a knock on FreeBSD; that's just the likely reality. Is that development pace sufficient to support thousands of different embedded chips? Does the FreeBSD project even want to see the kind of change in their development process that an influx of new embedded developers would likely entail?
It's easy to offer a long LTS release cadence when your project is stagnant.
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...
I didn't say FreeBSD was abandonware, its kernel development has just been relatively stagnant for decades vs. Linux. Which shouldn't come as particularly surprising considering how much more adoption and investment there's been surrounding Linux over that time period.
I don't think it's too far fetched for people clinging to their favorite GNU/Linux distro to switch to FreeBSD, especially on the server side where in my opinion, FreeBSD is the superior choice.
I think the world is better off when there are choices and the Linux near mono culture is not good for the FOSS movement, in my opinion.