What's wrong with simple monotonically increasing digits?
A lot of less technical people and fake security "experts" are going to freak out about a "2015" kernel. In general people seem less interested in how something is, than how something appears. That's why most companies still insist on password complexity rules and disable pasting to password fields, because it FEELS safer.
[Year of Initial Release].[Year of incremental release].[week of incremental release].[Incremental Number]
So:
2017.2018.39.332
Of course, modern software outside shrink-wrap context is evermore incremental and pushed to the customer in small deltas. Even Windows now tells me it's a "service and regular updates are normal procedure".
But look at Chrome is on like version 70 in the few years it has been hanging around. If there aren't going to be major discontinuous versions this is the way to go.