Hi! This is a bit of a newbie question, so please bear with me.
I purchased a laptop that has a specific hardware issue under Linux (the keyboard does not function). A patch fixing the issue was approved for 6.8 and incorporated in the “stable tree” of older kernels: 5.4, 5.10, 5.15, 6.6, 6.7, etc.
My question is: Do distros ship with an updated kernel that incorporates all the patches? Or does the user need to update after installation for the patches to be applied? I imagine that it may perhaps vary from distro to distro, but I honestly don’t know.
The question is relevant for me because, potentially, I would have to install the actual distro and update, rather than just try out a live version.
Usually the more stable distros just use older LTS versions because their last major release is longer ago on average but they still release security fixes for those versions quickly (assuming a distro with the resources to handle security support at all).
Red Hat and Debian both backport security fixes but don’t backport things like laptop device support. It can take a year or more for versions of those distros to gain the kind of functionality that is looking for.
They don’t Backport them but they do incorporate them if they are already part of the upstream LTS kernel used by that distro.
Have LTS kernels started backporting non security fixes like this? To be fair I haven’t looked at this in over a decade but this kind of patch wouldn’t have been backported then.
