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.
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.
Well, OP explicitly states that the patch for their issue has been incorporated into the stable trees for various older kernels.