Advantages and disadvantages of Kernel 6.11.5

I have a laptop that has been in use for more than ten years. I take good care of it because it has served me well during my development career. It uses a mechanical hard drive. It runs on an AMD processor and has four (4) cores. I have installed the Linux kernel 6.6.58-1 lts and the stable kernel 6.11.5 and I would like to know the advantages and disadvantages of the latter for these old machines, which one grows fond of and takes care of.

I’d figure the latest kernel is more relevant on newer hardware since it has support and patches for said hardware.

Personally, for an old machine that I’m just trying to keep going for as long as I can, I’d install linux-lts and call it a day. It doesn’t need the ‘latest and greatest’.

Honestly I would not mind running LTS as the main kernel even on my modern machine running a 14th gen Intel CPU. But linux-zen is just snappier and I like it that way.

1 Like

Thank you for your kind reply, but I want to know if having the stable Kernel 6.11.5 installed affects the normal use of updates in EndeavourOS. That is, if the updates arrive normally if I am using Linux-LTS. I think it is important to know these advantages and disadvantages.

The updates will arrive all the same regardless of which kernel you use.

LTS is generally more stable. Although rare, the latest kernel can produce problems if a new version of a package has a regression with it that isn’t present in LTS.

Nothing wrong with keeping both installed. I have LTS installed without linux-lts-headers as a fallback / backup kernel in case things go wrong on my main linux-zen.

Doesn’t matter how many kernels you have installed, updates occur normally. I have LTS, Zen & mainline installed, with absolutely no issues. Might be worth considering swapping the HD for an SSD though, speed increase is amazing.

1 Like

This. Easily the best way to refresh an old machine.

Even SSDs with DRAM cache are incredibly cheap these days.

1 Like

Thank you very much for your response. The recommendations you gave me are excellent.

Thank you very much for the reply. I am considering changing to an SSD and I will be able to use the mechanical one as an external storage unit.

1 Like

As has been alluded to already, switching out the old HDD for an SSD will give that system a brand new lease on life. It’s night and day difference.

HDD’s for decades, were one of the great bottlenecks and SSD’s were a game changer.

1 Like

I’ve taken to calling them ‘spinning rust drives’. There are none in any of my machines.

Even my external backup drive is an SSD.

1 Like