How likely is my system to break with the standard kernel?
Unlikely. Standard releases are still pretty stable.
this post was submitted on 21 Apr 2024
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LTS just means Long Term Support in case you weren't aware. It means no new development is happening, but security exploits will be patched as soon as they arise.
If you just want stability, LTS is the way to go. If you want all the cutting edge bells and whistles and are okay with potentially some instability (but probably not much) then use the latest version.
If your device isn't connected to the internet during general use then I wouldn't worry too much about updating anything. Security fixes aren't important if there's no way to connect to your device.
Stability isn't the same as unbreakability. It just means the update cycle is prolonged.
If you're worried about your system breaking, go for Fedora Atomic (Kinoite, Bazzite, uBlue, etc.).
It offers a very recent kernel (-> better hardware support, better performance, etc.) and because it's an image based distro, you can always roll back, so you'll always have a working and pretty much unbreakable system.
I’m running an LTS kernel on my desktop and a non-LTS on my laptop (both machine are running EndeavourOS). Both have been rock solid.
The only instability I’ve had is when I tried running a customised kernel (linux-cachyos)
I used to always go with Ubuntu LTS for dat stability. One day I had to upgrade to non-LTS version for some reason (that I completely forget) and I've never looked back. IME it's the same as LTS but with all the cool features you wish you had. Which I can't list rn because I forget.
...Who am I even. idk.
Don't worry too much about it if it doesn't make sense to you. It can be really valuable if you're deploying a substantial amount of IoT devices on the edge with no to little possibility to do over the air upgrades reliably or when the cost of failure is high (i.e. a technician has to be on site to fix it). So, sometimes you just want it to be running as stable as possible for as long as possible without management.
It depends on whether you like your OS to be boring or not. If you like it boring and the LTS kernel works for you, use it.
You can install multiple kernels along with their respective headers. As long as you create a hook that runs mkinitcpio and grub-mkconfig whenever you update the kernels, you can then choose which kernel you want to use when the grub menu comes up.
This way you can always use whichever kernel you want, and is good practice should an update to one of the kernels have breaking changes.