Just adopt semver. Stop romanticizing a version number. Give big releases a flowery names if that's important to you. Leave the version number as something with specific meaning.
Maybe it will adopt semver at some stage. I doubt it because the API is way too complex and broad to be covered in simple x.x.x notation, think of driver updates on vendors.
That's irrelevant.
I doubt it because the API is way too complex and broad to be covered in simple x.x.x notation
They don't use that notation now?
If Linux used semantic versioning we'd be up to at least version 200.0 by now.
So if you look at the userspace interface as the API semver would work against, we'd be at 1.0.1234 or something.
So what? 200 makes sense for software as old and consistently maintained as the Linux kernel. What is with the need of people to keep version numbers low?
That's your opinion. It seems there's a lot of people in the software industry with a different opinion.
I'm not saying it isn't a good thing when version numbers are meaningful. But that's not always the case and even when it's the case, you'd better check what it means for a particular project. There's no generic "scientific" rule about version numbers.