Let's talk about the LTS kernels

Lucien_Lachance

i installed the lts back in the day as backup. kept it out of habit, even though im pretty sure it wont work with my 5700 XT, never had trouble with the current. maybe we should have the most recent lts AND and oldish lts as well

DataDrake

Lucien_Lachance

DataDrake I also have no interest in adding the third kernel into the mix as having t[w]o already creates a lot of extra work.

davidjharder

Meta: poll needs an option for: "I am voting just to see results"
I clicked "other"

DataDrake

davidjharder Yeah, I realized that after the first couple of votes and don't want to risk resetting the counters by adding a new options.

brent

davidjharder My vote for 'other' is a false positive, too. I'm perusing results. I don't have LTS installed but considering it as insurance because sometimes I do wreck the system.

GueGuerreiro

jrsilvey I still can't boot up with the current kernel, I will inevitably get stuck on the black screen with the white cursor. I've been using LTS because it's the only thing that just boots me up with no issue. It's a fairly recent Custom Built (Clevo barebones) Laptop, too.

I've wasted many mornings trying to figure out what's keeping me from booting up on current, but I can never quite figure out what it is.

I'm afraid if LTS gets removed I'll have no way to use my laptop, and I'll lose quite a bit of stuff that I have set up here for work.

I'll admit I'm not the most savy when it comes to Linux in depth stuff, but I also feel like I shouldn't be just to be able to use Solus with no issues.

I had to rollback updates because I couldn't boot up anymore when this last update hit. It's kind of an elephant in the room that I'll have to address eventually, but I'm dreading it already

DataDrake

GueGuerreiro I'm afraid if LTS gets removed I'll have no way to use my laptop, and I'll lose quite a bit of stuff that I have set up here for work.

I'm not talking about removing LTS, just upgrading it to a newer version. If you wouldn't mind creating a separate post about your problems booting linux-current, let's see what we can figure out.

GueGuerreiro

DataDrake I was using my laptop for work over the week, so I couldn't really do it earlier, but I've now opened the thread at https://discuss.getsol.us/d/4942-can-t-boot-into-latest-kernel, if you could lend me a hand there, I would greatly appreciate it.

Scotty-Trees

If I remember correctly linux-current was fairly buggy when it was first released, and it took many point releases before they finally stopped having some regressions (one or two of those regressions were also nvidia driver related). Luckily with all the updates, I've been running linux-current without any issues for months now, but generally speaking for my Acer Aspire E5-576G laptop with hybrid graphics, I tend to experience at least one or two breakages/regressions from the kernel each year, so I have the LTS kernel as a backup that I used for about a month because the regressions don't always get fixed right away. I'm a patient person so I don't mind the wait, however, since the last couple of updates, the 4.9 kernel no longer lets me boot into a GUI, so my backup is no longer a working backup. Now I'm not too concerned at the moment since linux-current has become a very solid kernel now, but I do always have some concern when a new kernel is released that's a new major version. Having said all that, I'd be willing to test and see if the 4.14 LTS kernel is a worthy successor, but it definitely isn't an easy decision because no matter the kernel, some users will encounter problems, we just have to do our best to find and use the kernel that causes the least amount of problems for the community. I for one am glad we are having this open discussion and am hopeful we'll figure something out together.

putzerstammer

Hello I have an 8 year old notebook Asus and Thoshiba and no problems I think we should take the new LTS kernel and sorry for my English

Solarmass

I wanted a backup for when linux-current breaks and also I installed Solus when it was still the default kernel and have switched to the linux-current. I have 3 Solus installations.

RipperRoo

I selected Other because ever since I installed Solus two and a half weeks ago (as far as I can tell) it has been booting the LTS kernel by default. I'm using a 2011 Macbook Pro, so perhaps it's something to do with old hardware? Or maybe I inadvertently did something to make this happen?

I'm brand new to Linux so my cluelessness is probably on full display here. I haven't tried switching to the current kernel so far as everything has been running really well, but I could give it a try just to see if it works.

DataDrake

RipperRoo Did you install Virtualbox or one of the driver packages?

RipperRoo

DataDrake I installed the Broadcom driver that appeared in Hardware Drivers. The wifi didn't work straight away so I followed the instructions in this old post: https://discuss.getsol.us/d/23-getting-broadcom-wireless-cards-to-work
That's when I found out I was on the LTS kernel.

DataDrake

RipperRoo If you installed broadcom-sta first, that would have installed the linux-lts kernel by accident.

RipperRoo

DataDrake Ah, that explains it! I hadn’t dared to switch to the current kernel for fear of messing something up, but now that I know the LTS wasn’t the default one to begin with I’ll give switching a go. Thanks for clearing that up 🙂

darknetmatrix

i'm on the current, don't have LTS installed
no virtualbox but gnome-boxes

pappkamerad

I need LTS for my XPS 9560.

With current, beginning with 5.3 iirc, I have very bad performance, meaning weird lagging and, even worse, the system freezes and completely locks up after some random time.

Here some more info for my issue: https://linuxreviews.org/Linux_Kernel_5.5_Will_Not_Fix_The_Frequent_Intel_GPU_Hangs_In_Recent_Kernels

and as it is still not better or fixed, switching to 5.4 worries me

Fanton

pappkamerad There were initially quite a few posts here and on Reddit by users adressing their issues with freezing and lagging on intel at around 5.3. I for one use 4.9 whenever I need to do non-trivial stuff (even though it ruins my wifi), because performance is otherwise horrendous. If LTS is upgraded to 5.4 before this issue is fixed, I seriously don't know what to do except changing OS for the first time in some years.

palto42

On my 10y old laptop (Intel i5-460M & ATI MobilityRadeon HD5650) the current kernel causes issues with the wake-up from sleep, as I posted in ticket T8699. Since then I use the LTS kernel without issues and try every new release of the current kernel if it fixes the wake-up issue (until now it hasn't).
I had no issues with the current kernel until version 5.5, so an upgrade of LTS to 5.4 should hopefully work on my old hardware.

Getta91

I haven't got any issues so far with the current and the lts kernel. But I think moving the kernel to an 5.4 lts version would be very great!

tadcan

What I found curious about the recent breakage is that my old 750ti gpu was broken on nvidia current, even though it mostly worked on previous kernels. I presumed the problem for me was a gpu driver - lts kernel mismatch, but I don't know for sure.