n-1 isn't necessarily the wisest choice

Ask any vendor & you will find that one of their greatest frustrations is when customers insist on implementing only the "n-1" release of a particular product. 

At almost every meeting, vendors are asked about the availability of new features, or new capabilities, or new supported configurations that will match what the customer is trying to achieve, and yet when these are finally made available after much development and testing, customers will wait, and stick with supposedly safer older versions.

The risk-management logic, of course, is that the latest release is untried, and may contain flaws and bugs. Unfortunately this misses the point that fixes to older flaws are made possible by deploying a new release. It also brings up the laughable scenario of customers asking for new features to be "back-ported" to the older, "safe" release. Pro-tip: if you back-port all of your new features to the older release, then you end up with the new release anyway!

There are also some times when you just can't take advantage of the latest technology unless you're up-to-date: for example getting the most benefit out of new CPU's requires the operating system software to be in-sync. As SUSE VP of engineering Olaf Kirch points out in this article from 2012, when new features are introduced, you can either back-port to old code (possibly introducing errors) or take the new code and harden it. 

Which brings me to the real point of this article - when we're  talking about open source, the rate of change can be extremely rapid. This means that by the time you get a hardened, tested,  enterprise version of software out of the door, it is already at least version "n-1" : the bleeding-edge stuff is happening at the forefront of the community project, where many eyes and many egos are working on improvements to correctness and performance as well as features. So there's really no reason to require an n-1 release of, say, enterprise Linux ... all you're doing in that case is hobbling your hardware, paying more for extended support, and missing out on access to improvements.

So when SUSE introduces a new kernel revision mid-way through a major release, as it is doing with SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 Service Pack 2 (SLE12SP2), don't fret about the risks: the bleeding edge has already moved forward, and what you're getting is just the best, hardened, QA'd, engineered version of Linux with the most functionality.