this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2023
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Should I switch from the older OEM kernel to the newer generic kernel? (lemm.ee)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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I am using a Dell Latitude 3420 (Ubuntu 22.04.3) and it uses a slightly older OEM kernel 5.14.0-1048-oem. The generic kernels keep getting upgraded but are never used. The current generic that I have is 6.2.0-26-generic and 5.15.0-79-generic.

So I have 2 questions

  1. Should I leave the kernel as it is? Some threads online say it's better to leave it as it is as an OEM kernel is better for Ubuntu-certified laptops
  2. If I should change the kernel, what would be the best way? I don't want to hard-code the kernel version.
    • If I have issues in the latest generic kernel, I should be able to roll-back to the OEM kernel.

Related links

  1. https://askubuntu.com/questions/1395080/which-kernel-should-i-use-for-my-hardware-oem-or-generic
  2. https://www.reddit.com/r/XPS/comments/rif7wo/ubuntu_after_installation_oem_kernel_instead_of/
  3. https://askubuntu.com/questions/1387979/removing-a-oem-installed-kernel
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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Is the OEM kernel getting security updates? Then it should be fine.

If you want a specific feature that's available in the newer kernel, then just try it out. You can select the kernel during boot. If it all works, uninstall the OEM kernel and it should default to the generic one.

Edit: If you want to find out whether you're getting security updates, I'd check the changelog. It should be somewhere like /usr/share/doc/linux-image-somethingsomething/changelog.gz. The entries there should have a date. If the last security fix is older than a couple of weeks, that would be concerning.