My kernel version is ‘6.8.0-87-generic’ and hers is ‘6.14.00-33-generic’. My brother, who uses CachyOS, has kernel version ‘6.17.1-2-cachyos’. So it makes a little sense that the kernel is different. Even though I always thought that there was just one kernel that all Linux versions use.
But why is there a different kernel for the same distro?
It wasn’t really a big issue, but it was confusing. I thought that with the same Linux distro version, the highest kernel version offered would also be the same. But upgrading the kernel to a higher version (6.8 to 6.14), rather than just updating it (6.8.0-85 to 6.8.0-87 in my case), doesn’t work via the standard update management UI; you have to go to ‘View’ -> ‘Linux Kernel’.
I have now upgraded to version 6.14 and everything is running smoothly.
Glad to help. And also glad you filled in the blanks I was forgetting! Best of luck. Mint and LMDE is great.
Different distros do it differently.
For OpenSUSE it always presents you the latest kernel during updates, and keeps an old version as backup should your system fail to boot on new kernel.
does upgrading it thru apt work?