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.
The distros usually take care of that, often they add or backport additional patches too but the patches in the stable upstream kernel your distro kernel is based on are incorporated as well (unless there is specific reason to revert them because the patch is known to cause more issues than it fixes). Obviously only as long as the distro is fully supported, after that it might depend on the exact LTS policy or if it is completely out of support you should get a new version of the distro.