My kernel version is ‘6.8.0-87-generic’ and hers is ‘6.14.00-33-generic’. My brother, who uses CachyOS, has kernel version ‘6.17.1-2-cachyos’. So it makes a little sense that the kernel is different. Even though I always thought that there was just one kernel that all Linux versions use.

But why is there a different kernel for the same distro?

  • SavvyWolf@pawb.socialEnglish
    6·
    1 month ago

    I don’t know if they still do it, but Mint used to do staggered updates (through their update manager) for some packages. They would start out making the update only available for, say, 10% of people and then slowly built up to 100% if no issues were discovered.

  • Frellwit@lemmy.world
    5·
    1 month ago

    That depends on the install date. If you installed Mint 22 when it was released you’re not on the HWE kernel. If you install a later version of Mint based on Ubuntu 24.04.2 or later you’ll get the HWE kernel which auto-updates to newer versions during the lifetime of the distro.

    • Aequitas@feddit.orgOP
      4·
      1 month ago

      Haha, my brother, our IT guy, has made it his mission to wipe out Windows in our family.

  • LeFantome@programming.dev
    4·
    1 month ago

    Mint has two kernels: a “stable” one and a “hardware enhanced” one (HWE). The HWE kernel is newer to improve support for newer hardware.

    Many distros allow you to pick from multiple kernels.

    Yes, all Linux kernels come from kernel.org

    That said, kernel.org maintains not only a latest but also multiple “stable” kernels that maintained versions of previous kernels. There are usually about a half-dozen kernel versions to choose from.

    One you have code from kernel.org, you can change the configuration to get kernels with slightly different capabilities and strengths.

    Finally, you can patch the code you get from kernel.org to add or remove whatever you want. For example, you may add in filesystem support or drivers missing in the mainline kernel.

    So, in the end, any given Linux distro may have a Linux kernel slightly different from what other distros use. You can probably run any Linux distro on the kernel from any other Linux distro though. In fact, this is what you are doing when you run something like Docker or Kubernetes.