Intel Alder Lake Users On Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Will Want To Switch To A Newer Kernel

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Intel Alder Lake Users On Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Will Want To Switch To A Newer Kernel

Next week's Ubuntu 22.04 LTS "Jammy Jellyfish" is using Linux 5.15 by default given that the kernel is also a "Long Term Support" release. While it makes sense in theory, in practice with Linux 5.16 having been out as stable since January and Linux 5.17 out for several weeks already there is a lot of hardware improvements past the v5.15 that haven't been back-ported or otherwise picked up by Ubuntu Jammy's kernel build. The main pain point this presents is for those using the latest-generation Intel "Alder Lake" processors with a mix of performance and power efficiency cores. My testing of Alder Lake this week on the latest Ubuntu 22.04 LTS build still shows that its 5.15-based experience being less than desirable with measurable -- often very significant -- improvements if using v5.16 or later.

https://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=31046

[bobbie424242]

That's the reason why, if you have bleeding edge hardware (notoriously laptops, but not only), you use a rolling distro such as openSUSE Tumbleweed, providing latest kernels to make best use of your cool new hardware.

[user1]

That's the reason why, if you have bleeding edge hardware (notoriously laptops, but not only), you use a rolling distro such as openSUSE Tumbleweed, providing latest kernels to make best use of your cool new hardware.

Except not everyone will want to suffer from the high probability of breakages in rolling release distros. Imo, of all distros, Fedora has the best balance of up to date packages and stability.

[bobbie424242]

Except not everyone will want to suffer from the high probability of breakages in rolling release distros. Imo, of all distros, Fedora has the best balance of up to date packages and stability.

3 years of openSUSE Tumbleweed now with countless updates on my workhorse Thinkpad and it did not break. If it does, I can revert to the previous snapshot from GRUB.

[Charlie68]

Except not everyone will want to suffer from the high probability of breakages in rolling release distros. Imo, of all distros, Fedora has the best balance of up to date packages and stability.

In my ten-year experience on Ubuntu and five years on Tumbleweed, I've had many more failures on Ubuntu, this on my hardware that doesn't need proprietary drivers. The few times that a breakdown happened on Tumbleweed I simply canceled the update with a rollback, while on Ubuntu when it went well I wasted hours restoring the system, when it went wrong I had to format, with all that that entails. I don't want to talk about stability, because a rolling system by nature cannot be stable (stopped), however I often ran into bugs on Ubuntu, which were never fixed in that release, so if stability means fewer bugs, this is false.

[braiam]

Canonical will not do this. They have already tried using non-LTS kernels and were burned hard for it, having to apply patches themselves instead of having upstream create them.

[user1]

3 years of openSUSE Tumbleweed now with countless updates on my workhorse Thinkpad and it did not break. If it does, I can revert to the previous snapshot from GRUB.

That's fair, but different people might have different experiences, depending on what packages they use, their hardware, etc. Also, I didn't mean breakage in a sense of distro not booting after an update, but also in a sense of a package/app starting to have issues/buggy behavior after an update.

[bobbie424242]

That's fair, but different people might have different experiences, depending on what packages they use, their hardware, etc. Also, I didn't mean breakage in a sense of distro not booting after an update, but also in a sense of a package/app starting to have issues/buggy behavior after an update.

I get what you mean, and I can understand people not being comfortable with regularly updating a rolling distro. Packages or functionality breakage can happen occasionally on openSUSE TW, in which case it's still possible to rollback to the previous working snapshot if there is no other work-around. On openSUSE TW, you can update the distro several months apart if you want to (or any granularity that works best for you), instead of upgrading to a snapshot as soon as it is available.
Still I would recommend a rolling distro to anyone having recent hardware and not totally a newcomer to Linux.
After 3 years of using a rolling distro, I cannot imagine anything else now, and (for my use) it made obsolete the usual distro release model with a new full blown release every 6 months or year (or even more). At the time these distros are released, some of the software is already old.

[yossarianuk]

The lack of latest kernel/mesa/nvidia drivers (out the box) is the reason I do not recommend Ubuntu as a desktop distro, this is what makes PopOS a better choice.

(Not that i personally run PopOS ..)

[andre30correia]

The lack of latest kernel/mesa/nvidia drivers (out the box) is the reason I do not recommend Ubuntu as a desktop distro, this is what makes PopOS a better choice.

(Not that i personally run PopOS ..)

they have point realeases and upgrade kernel and gpu stack, the non free is upgrading always since at least 4 years ago.

If people need the last kernel they have pre build ones, i dont see the problem here, the same happens with windows if we need the last drivers we need to upgrade or use tools for that, the ones in windoes upgrade are always out dated, rolling distros even if some people says no, they have many problems after some time