What are minor upgrades?

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Hi everyone,

Debian stable user here, I’m trying to understand minor upgrades and if Leap suits me.

What is upgraded during a minor upgrade? I’ve read this post and this wiki article but the concrete answers that I’m looking for are missing.

I understand that minor upgrades provide security updates/patches and bug fixes. But do desktop environments and apps receive functionality upgrades? Will KDE plasma be updated? Will Gimp, for example, be updated? Do LTS kernels receive updates when a new LTS kernel comes out? Or do these updates only happen during major upgrades (every six years or so)?

Sorry for this silly question. Thank you for your time!

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The wiki explains that a minor upgrade is as example between Leap 15.5 to Leap 15.6. So a minor upgrade every year.

As stable releases only get bugfixes, security updates and patches, the base version of a package stays almost the same. A minor upgrade is used to provide some newer base versions of packages to reduce the necessary patches and have a slightly more actual set of packages.

As example, Leap 15.5 got shipped with Gnome 41. Leap 15.6 got shipped with Gnome 45. So you get newer package versions with more or newer feautures.

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