The jump from 7.x right to 24.x had me thinking this was an AI generated article at first, but the main LibreOffice website does indeed show that the new version number is 24.
EDIT: The article literally talks about this and I missed it. Twice. I would like to claim to be on drugs, but sadly(?) this is not the case.
The choice of 24 makes me think they’ve decided to switch to using the last two digits of the current year as the main version number, rather than the previous arbitrary increases, but I can’t find anything obvious about this on the site.
Their current release schedule is every six months, and as long as they don’t accelerate the way web browser releases do, this probably wouldn’t come back to bite them.
The sub-version being .2 and it being February soon makes me wonder if that’s intentional as well.
As for commentary on LibreOffice itself: I use it every once in a while, so I don’t dig deep into its feature set(s) at all. In a previous update I noticed a few things had been moved around in Calc (the spreadsheet) which I’m still getting used to, but by and large all I can do is appreciate those working on it and, for whatever it’s worth, thank them for their efforts.
So… you didn’t read the article?
All of your speculation about versioning is correct. The subtitle of the article says:
This major release introduces a new calendar-based numbering scheme,
The second paragraph begins with:
Highlights of LibreOffice 24.2 include a new calendar-based numbering scheme (YY.M),
No one learned from Y2K 🤦♂️
In under 80 years they’ll have to change the system again smh
