I don't doubt your word that a wise man told you that, however, you could possibly have misunderstood because it is not correct.Turpin wrote:... but a wise man once told me, Linux is Linux 9 (of course, he never tried Puppy, but for the most part, Linuxes work similarly).
Linux is the kernel upon which the OSS runs. Kernels don't have arbitrary marketing numbers. Kernels have version numbers like "2.6.xx" and like. Released distros often have number series like you mention and some distros like to use high numbers to make their distro sound newest but the principals of the distro decide on the numbers and how they relate to code maturity and version and release cycle. Example: Latest stable release of Debian is 4.0, 2.6.8.18 kernel version, and it can run the latest Firefox with Flash 9. While the latest version of Slackware is 12 and it also can run the latest browser and Flash.
That doesn't negate the fact that a new version of a binary for a browser might not work with a old version of flash or vice-versa, but that's a bit different from what you stated. I don't want newbies reading this to get the wrong idea or think that "linux" is an operating system. Puppy linux is an operating system (one using the linux kernel).