Should I switch from the older OEM kernel to the newer generic kernel?
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
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
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.
The OEM kernel is also called the OEM staging kernel, because the delta in OEM kernel should all be merged to the generic kernel in the next Ubuntu release, so it is essentially a staging code base.
Since the latest kernel SHOULD have all the hardware-specific commits of the OEM, right?
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.
Are there specific bugs vulnerabilities in your current kernel that you want to avoid? There usually isn't much to gain by upgrading kernels, unless you have unsupported hardware or a kernel vulnerability. And if your lucky, the OEM kernel should have bug fixes backported to it anyway.
If you have the generic kernels installed, you should be able to boot them from GRUB/bootloader, try it and see if it all still works?