Why should you care about the kernel?

The kernel is the one that makes your computer work. It makes you get things done. Your tasks could be printing out that report due in ten minutes or sending email when your client demands your reply. The kernel would be the key to the efficient use of your computer’s resources.

Sometimes you want to do some things but you can’t. For example, your laptop is having problems with hibernate/sleep. There is a chance that you might have to reconfigure your kernel so that the hardware involved in the process would be able to work well.

There are times that other users might have problems with an operating system because nothing seems to happen upon boot-up. It could be that the kernel doesn’t support the hardware. I’ve encountered such a problem before.

This is part of the reason why it’s not always easy to choose a Linux distribution. For certain hardware, you might have difficulty not just because of the drivers but also the kernel. Your distribution’s kernel might not be the right fit with your hardware. There are ways to go about it. For one, you could opt to use a different kernel (possibly an older version because there are cases wherein the older hardware does need older kernels), you could compile it then use it with your existing desktop environment and applications. That or look for a distro like that. An example is AntiX. If you want to read more about how AntiX is like for older machines, you could check out the Linux.com feature on AntiX.