Which kernel should i use?

Support Kernel
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1

I can’t decide which kernel version i should use, should i use lts or stable? What are their pros and cons? And how am i supposed to choose a kernel for my distro?

2

There are two good reasons to use the latest kernel: one is that you use newer hardware that is only supported by the latest release and two is that you believe the latest version is more optimized, and thus faster. In practice, I’ve never found a noticeable difference between kernels as I’ve used Manjaro on non-recent hardware and on my hardware (i5, ssd) the user is the delaying factor. LTS is perhaps better because you can leave it there for a while but that is a personal preference.

3

How stable is the latest kernel? I’m concerned about stability because i had severe issues with Windows 10 twice, do the Manjaro devs make some extra testing on the kernels like the repositories?

I did notice the latest kernel runs much smoother than 5.4 lts, it must be due to optimizations and drivers.

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4

About stability of the latest kernel I can only say that it depends mostly on your hardware but that before you can download it there is first the testing from the Arch users (actually even earlier the developers) and then there follows a period in testing here. But you have to know this is a rolling distribution that tries to provide the latest software so absolute certainty does not exist.

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Could you explain how the hardware affects stability? Does every kernel version behave differently?

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Combination of hardware is different on diverse systems and that may affect stability. And as each kernel is different and new the software introduced can react differently on diverse hardware. I’m not saying it will go wrong because mostly Linux is very reliable but there are infinite combinations and each new kernel may introduce problems and you can read that on this forum.

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Thanks for clearing my doubts, i’m always concerned about stability because Windows 10 broke 2 laptops of mine and i don’t like going through such headache, i don’t think i’m gonna have such issues with Linux but i’m always cautious.