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Unrelated, but any major OS version change these days feels contrived and unnecessary. What is changing so drastically that we need a major version bump and hours of upgrading?

IMO, the versioning should follow a pattern of 2024.01, 2025.03, etc.. and updates should be seamless.

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Enterprise linux distributions pin package versions through the entire "major" release. They get security backports and often feature backports (for the first few years) but nothing which would change an API or ABI - for 10+ years.

As such, the answer to your question is "pretty much everything". Wildly different kernel, libraries, etc.

In theory it would be nice to roll upgrades like you suggest, but there are huge swathes of industry for which it's not a practical solution.

... And we all know that rolling upgrades frequently introduce breaking changes that don't make sense for enterprise environments. To your (great) point: Customers pay companies like red hat for software stability, both in how it works and how their software interfaces to it.

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