Hi, I am new to Qubes OS. When I boot the live USB, I can choose to install with standard kernel (which is 5.x currently) and with latest kernel (6.x). I know that by choosing the latest kernel, some hardware issue will be gone. But then why Qubes OS don’t just provide the latest kernel only to have a wider support on hardware. What is the advantage of choosing standard kernel over the latest? Won’t the Qubes Updater update it to latest kernel anyway even I choose standard kernel at installation?
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Typically the standard Linux kernel has seen more fix cycles than the latest kernel and has been used by a wider audience (in general as well as in a QubesOS context).
The newer kernel is more likely to support newer hardware but is less likely to have been tested with older hardware.
Generally, it’s good to have options.
B
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It won’t, cause the standard kernel is in the dom0 packages kernel (for dom0 itself) and kernel-qubes-vm (provided by dom0 to VMs), but the latest kernel is in the kernel-latest and kernel-latest-qubes-vm packages respectively. (It’s possible to install all of them and even use different types for dom0 and some or all VMs.)
Basically the latest kernel is close to the “stable” version listed on kernel.org, while the standard kernel is close to one of the “longterm” versions in that table.
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