I’ve heard LTS kernels offer more stability, but lack the latest features. How likely is my system to break with the standard kernel?

5 points

Do you need those features? If not, go LTS. LTS means you’ll have to update the distro less frequently than latest.

If you want those features, go non-LTS, there’s no other choice. If you don’t want them, go LTS, it’s less of a hassle.

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5 points

And “those features” could very well include “able to use recent hardware”

Built a new PC and had to upgrade to a newer kernel to get my video working correctly; without it, was only getting 1 monitor at embarrassingly low resolution

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0 points

You can install multiple kernels along with their respective headers. As long as you create a hook that runs mkinitcpio and grub-mkconfig whenever you update the kernels, you can then choose which kernel you want to use when the grub menu comes up.

This way you can always use whichever kernel you want, and is good practice should an update to one of the kernels have breaking changes.

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2 points

It depends on whether you like your OS to be boring or not. If you like it boring and the LTS kernel works for you, use it.

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6 points

Stability isn’t the same as unbreakability. It just means the update cycle is prolonged.

If you’re worried about your system breaking, go for Fedora Atomic (Kinoite, Bazzite, uBlue, etc.).
It offers a very recent kernel (-> better hardware support, better performance, etc.) and because it’s an image based distro, you can always roll back, so you’ll always have a working and pretty much unbreakable system.

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32 points

LTS kernels aren’t more or less stable. Rather, they have been selected by the kernel maintainers to get security fixes backported to them for a certain time.

Ubuntu does the same thing for the kernels on their LTS versions (technically they usually are not LTS kernels since canonical supports them instead of kernel team)

Overall I’d suggest going with what the distro provides unless you have very new hardware, in which case a newer kernel may be required

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