I’ve been using Linux Mint Debian Edition 4 as my daily driver (both work and play) for the better part of a year. Being a Debian-based distribution, we can generally count on stability albeit at the cost of the most up-to-date packages. LMDE4 comes with Linux Kernel 4.19 but if for whatever reason you need to update to a new Linux Kernel, it’s a fairly easy process and can be done with just a few commands.
First, we can confirm which version we have with the command: uname -a.
Let’s go ahead and upgrade.
We can search for the latest kernel by searching the repos with the following command: apt search linux-image. Here we find that the most current stable (and signed) version of the Linux Kernel for 64 bit CPUs is version 5.8.
To install this version, we’ll enter the command: sudo apt install linux-image-5.8.0-0.bpo.2-amd64. This process can take a bit – it took a little over 10 minutes for me.
Once complete, reboot the machine. Now enter the first command we entered above to confirm we’ve updated to version 5.8
And we’re done!