Score:0

General question HWE kernel, does it upgrade other software

pl flag

I am using Ubuntu 20.04 on a Dell precision M4800 laptop(4th gen I7) and kernel 5.4.(?), upgraded from 18.04.

I do not need or require the HWE 5.8 kernel for my hardware, but am wondering if 5.8 would upgrade or enable upgrades of other regular Ubuntu software?

Most searches for HWE only finds kernel upgrade or how to install/uninstall.

Question is if installing HWE kernel does more than an upgrade of just the kernel?

Installing of HWE is easy to find, so do not need that information.

Thank you.

Score:2
ar flag

No

Upgrading to newer kernel using HWE does not upgrade any other software. In general the other software that get installed with Ubuntu don't get upgraded during the life of that version of Ubuntu except for security reasons. Firefox get updated for this reason.

So, you will not get a newer version of LibreOffice or Shotwell if you install HWE kernels.

Hope this helps

crip659 avatar
pl flag
Thank you for your answer. What I thought, but very little information on it online. Your answer deserves a check mark also. Was hard to choose.
Score:2
cn flag

Based on my experience with 14.04 and 16.04, the HWE kernel doesn't "upgrade" other packages, but it may enable performance improvements other than simply supporting hardware that came out after the initial release of the LTS version you're using.

For instance, I found in 16.04 that I got a significant improvement in computing speed as seen in more rapid completion of BOINC distributed computing tasks.

Essentially what you're getting with the HWE kernel is a newer kernel revision, incorporating all the improvements made to the kernel between the one you're running and the one that carries the HWE label. You're not getting newer versions of any other packages, unless there's an upgrade or backport that specifically requires the HWE kernel version.

crip659 avatar
pl flag
Both are good answers, wish I could give both a check mark for accepted answer.
Zeiss Ikon avatar
cn flag
Thanks for the checkmark!
Zeiss Ikon avatar
cn flag
And thanks for the reminder -- I just grabbed the 20.04 HWE kernel (5.11.0.25) last night -- and yep, it seems to perform slightly better than the 5.4.x that I had before.
mangohost

Post an answer

Most people don’t grasp that asking a lot of questions unlocks learning and improves interpersonal bonding. In Alison’s studies, for example, though people could accurately recall how many questions had been asked in their conversations, they didn’t intuit the link between questions and liking. Across four studies, in which participants were engaged in conversations themselves or read transcripts of others’ conversations, people tended not to realize that question asking would influence—or had influenced—the level of amity between the conversationalists.