1·
1 year agoIs the OEM kernel getting security updates? Then it should be fine.
If you want a specific feature that’s available in the newer kernel, then just try it out. You can select the kernel during boot. If it all works, uninstall the OEM kernel and it should default to the generic one.
Edit: If you want to find out whether you’re getting security updates, I’d check the changelog. It should be somewhere like /usr/share/doc/linux-image-somethingsomething/changelog.gz. The entries there should have a date. If the last security fix is older than a couple of weeks, that would be concerning.
Should just work. No need to reinstall. You are correct in thinking that all the drivers are included, and furthermore, the drivers on Linux are typically loaded automatically when the hardware is detected on every boot, and this is not configured anywhere in a file or anything like that.
Usually, anyway. In theory it’s possible that you manually (or some tool) hardcoded drivers somewhere, like in xorg.conf, but I’m willing to bet that isn’t the case.