It has recently been announced that the next LTS kernel will be Linux Kernel 4.9. This was announced by one of the heavyweights in the linux world and one of the leading developers, the great Greg Kroah-Hartman.
The acronym LTS stands for Long Term Support, that is, long-term support. A software with long-lasting support has much longer life than standard media, being an ideal software for people who do not like to spend all day updating their equipment.
Although it seems that version 4.9 of the kernel is still a bit far behind, this is not the case, since we are already on version 4.7 of the kernel. Between version 4.7 and version 4.9 we have version 4.8, which has already begun to develop and it plans to leave more or less at the end of September.
Following the usual kernel version development cycle, which lasts 2 monthsWe have the last week of November as the expected release date for kernel 4.9, with development that would begin more or less in early October and would last for the usual 2 months.
Many popular distros coming out around this time are expected to adopt this kernel. For example, very popular distributions such as Ubuntu 16.10 and Fedora 25 among other. Other distributions such as Arch Linux are also likely to adopt this kernel, in addition to other operating systems such as Linux Mint, although there is no official confirmation.
For now we have to settle for version 4.7, which has been included in operating systems such as Arch Linux. In 2 months we will have version 4.8 and then finally version 4.9 on the dates already mentioned.
We remember that these are not fixed dates, since anything could happen and these dates change. What is clear is that andwe are looking forward to the kernel 4.9 release and we still don't even have the 4.7 kernel.