[megous]

There's no such need for regular users. I upgrade to linus/master branch regularly since ~4.4, and there's no API breakage, aside from regressions (expected for -rc* kernels, I think) or very obscure stuff like media pipelines changing shape and whatnot.

[mort96]

Are you kidding? If you're on slightly unusual or esoteric hardware, the chance that something about your system breaks after a kernel upgrade is not insignificant. The chance is much lower when upgrading from one LTS point release to another.

[megous]

Why would I be kidding? Userspace ABI doesn't break much at all. Unbootalbe system is also quite rare. Obscure drivers may break, but I just fix them or wait a bit if I don't have time, that's why I run rc kernels, afterall. But that's not an ABI break.

[mort96]

I wasn't disputing your userspace ABI thing. But you said "There's no ... need [to run an LTS kernel] for regular users". Regular users like their hardware not to break, which means LTS kernels are useful.

If everything is working for you, and you don't need any features or enhancements from a newer kernel, it's totally reasonable for a normal user to not want to risk frequent kernel upgrades.

[megous]

LTS != stable. On average there's a LTS upgrade every 7 days. Mainline's release cadence is 3 months.

There are a lot of changes going into longterm supported branches: 10s of thousands of patches that were developed and tested against a different codebase written many years into the future are being backpatched into up to 6 year older codebase on top of other randomly picked patches with a hope/assumption that everything will work out the same way it does on mainline. It often does, but uh...

Mainline gets months of testing for each final release, stable releases get about a week of testing at most.

I definitely put my trust into mainline as a regular user. I also like the support for my HW to keep improving as a regular user, which mostly happens with mainline, if I have recent HW.

I view long term supported releases as speciality release useful for some very specific situations, like for device manufacturers who dislike instability of internal kernel apis and can validate each such release against extensive testsuite before pushing it to users. I would not run it as a normal user. (maybe with an offset of several releases, to have more testing for each stable release by others before I move to it)

[mort96]

Well, given how frequently kernel upgrades break stuff, if what you're saying about LTS reliability is true, I suppose the only reasonable solution for regular users is to never update their kernel. Or use a distro which holds kernel releases back for months to do their own validation, like Ubuntu and Debian.

[megous]

I have different experience. I'm on the same Arch install (migrated across 3 different computers) for 15 years, going through almost every minor version kernel update during that time, and I never saw breakage of my system caused by the kernel update. Maybe I'm just lucky picking HW. :)