Are they the same? No. You can look at the release notes to see what changes were made, and to decide if anything in there is important to you. In some cases, you might see bugs fixed.
Should you install it? This is up to you. Note that there are no updates made to old releases from past years, so if there are problems that are found, those bugs will not be fixed if you stay in a previous release. Clearly they cannot keep maintaining releases over a span of many years, since that would take a massive amont of work. So once a year is quit, any patches and new features will go only into the new releases.
