Yes, I think a lot of it also depends on how much you interact with the code of the open source project vs just consume the finished product. If you're just a

Yes, I think a lot of it also depends on how much you interact with the code of the open source project vs just consume the finished product. If you're just a consumer, then it makes a lot of sense to consume the LTS branch. Whenever I've run ubuntu (which I do not contribute to), I run LTS for that reason. In our case, we have a team of kernel engineers who make frequent contributions and are very familiar with the FreeBSD source code. So we're in a good position to inspect the frequent merges from upstream. The other benefit to tracking the main branch closely is that it makes it far easier to contribute changes. When tracking the main branch, its easy to test a change in our tree, and then pick it up almost unmodified as a patch to the FreeBSD main branch. That makes it much easier to get the code into FreeBSD. In fact, for most smaller changes, we try to push them upstream first and bring them back with our frequent upstream merges This is much harder when running a several years old branch, as then the patch needs to be forward ported to the FreeBSD main branch. As such, its very hard to integrate and test changes suggested by reviewers, as the patch needs to be ported back and forth. And things get worse for large changes (like new TCP stacks, kTLS, etc), which are harder to port back and forth.