When I was involved we did LTS, and then half the distro team was focused on the LTS .1 release which happens 3 months later. The reality of software is that no

When I was involved we did LTS, and then half the distro team was focused on the LTS .1 release which happens 3 months later. The reality of software is that no amount of internal testing is the same as the amount of bug reports you get after the release. And, for an LTS as it's going to be around for a long time getting fixes in is more important - with a standard release you can choose to leave some that you'll resolve in the next six month release. The reality of doing LTS, plus LTS .1 mean that the next standard release didn't get as much attention. So in reality the first six month release was often very rough, with a lot of new things in it that would be straightened out over the course of the entire cycle. As someone mentions later in the thread Canonical started doing HWE releases, which means you can run a later kernel on the LTS. So I'm running 18.04.4 (I think) which has a HWE kernel that is newer than the one that originally shipped - not just security fixes but newer hardware compatibility.