I have Manjaro-i3wm on a 13 year old Toshiba laptop. That laptop has an old Pentium Dual T3400 CPU and 4GB RAM with a 128GB SSD. It runs great for its age.
The kernel version is 4.14.219-1-MANJARO.
I don’t run any fancy new hardware on this machine. It’s for fairly basic computing. I keep the system up-to-date. I never have any issues updating nor any error messages.
I realize this is a fairly old kernel now but “it just works”. I see no reason to upgrade the kernel given my situation, but if someone has a good reason for doing so please let me know what it is and I might consider it.
I see no compelling reason to upgrade the kernel until you no longer receive security updates.
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Kernel 4.14 will be supported until January 2024. After that date, I would recommend switching.
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“Anything that worked on Linux once, will work forever” – try proving this statement wrong searching the whole internet. Upgrading kernels isn’t necessary if you don’t use newer hardware and are using a supported version. But if you occasionally use new hardware or software you will need to update you’re kernel. Again, it’s a totally personal choice.
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yours is fine. the only “upgrade” to old processors came with 5.9 with FSGSBASE instructions, and that only apply to 3rd Generation Intel Core processors (Ivy Bridge) and after