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Looking to upgrade kernel in Pop OS. I want to know if it is safe to just install latest kernel straight from current version to newest version. I've worked alot with machines that needed firmware updates and some of them had to have the firmware updated slowly in a couple of steps at a time. Not sure if Linux works anything like this. Any one have experience doing this? I did stumble around the web for answers but kept finding sites 8 to 10 years old. What do you think is best way to do this?

Looking to upgrade kernel in Pop OS. I want to know if it is safe to just install latest kernel straight from current version to newest version. I've worked alot with machines that needed firmware updates and some of them had to have the firmware updated slowly in a couple of steps at a time. Not sure if Linux works anything like this. Any one have experience doing this? I did stumble around the web for answers but kept finding sites 8 to 10 years old. What do you think is best way to do this?

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[–] • 1 pt (edited )

No

Get it from your distro

EDIT

Sorry, looked like you wanted to install a kernel from outside Pop OS

Not sure how safe. I would let the package manager pick or at least see what it wants to do

[–] • 0 pt

Check the release notes. Usually ALL such issues are listed there.

[–] • 0 pt (edited )

You should be fine. You should already have the latest CPU firmware installed and linux works hard to preserve abi.

Only catch night be nvidia driver but 5.10 has been out long enough I wouldn't expect issues.

If you're using grub, you can have multiple kernels installed. So rolling back shouldn't pose a challenge.

Iirc, btrfs has numerous improvements and bug fixes. So if btrfs user, prob what you want.

[–] • 0 pt

It is perfectly safe, so long as you are keeping all your other packages up to date, because your distro should allow you the ability to have more than one kernel installed at a time.

If you 're using the GRUB bootloader, just hold down shift at boot to see the menu and chose which one to use. It will default to the highest number, unless you have previously selected a different one. Then, if you have problems with 5.10, you can uninstall it and go back to 5.8.

Never only have one kernel installed. Always good to have a second (mostly the latest LTS kernel) available to fallback on.