2 ms·
In real world, it may give you zero tanglible improvements (only virtual ones), against a variable amount of maintenance overhead. Aside the obvious manual dow
by pizza234 9y ago
In real world, it may give you zero tanglible improvements (only virtual ones), against a variable amount of maintenance overhead.
Aside the obvious manual download and installation, if you use ZFS and Ubuntu LTS for example, it's messy, because the shipped ZFS version won't support the most recent kernel, so you'll have to separately download the ZFS packages from the most recent Ubuntu. This is just an edge case of course.
Also, distributions like Ubuntu LTS now provide stable kernel upgrades, so that you're not significantly far from the latest versions (16.04.3 will ship shortly, and will likely have 4.10 or more recent).
Ultimately, it really depends on your machine. If you have recent hardware (eg. Skylake), then definitely new versions will bring compatibility (along with updated `linux-firmware` package).
I've been using mainline versions for the last years, due to recent hardware, and didn't have any problems (aside the ZFS issue, which made me move to BTRFS).