apt - Older kernel installed by dist-upgrade?

I've finally got around to making the long overdue move from Win 10 to Ubuntu 16.04. Doing my best to stay sane and get used to it.

Upon installing Ubuntu, two kernel versions were listed in grub: 4.13.0-38 and 4.13.0-37. Then I decided to do run apt dist-upgrade, which installed 4.4.0-119 - an older version? Then I also ran apt autoremove to delete the old kernels.

After booting into the newly installed version, I also found that the update had broken some fn-shortcuts and touchpad gestures (Asus laptop), so I booted back into the version I started with.

With that said, I have two newbie questions:

1. Why was an older kernel installed?


2. Why was I able to boot into the old kernel after having it removed by apt autoremove?

LTS releases have two available kernel series, the GA versions and the HWE versions:

• GA (General Availability) is the kernel version with which the Ubuntu release got initially releases, which was 4.4 for Ubuntu 16.04. The metapackage providing GA kernels is linux-generic


• HWE (Hardware Enablement) is the backported kernel version from the latest Ubuntu release, i.e. currently from 17.10, which is kernel 4.13. It contains support for the latest hardware (therefore the name) and other feature updates. The metapackage for HWE kernels in 16.04 is linux-generic-hwe-16.04.

If you install 16.04.0 or 16.04.1 (the initial release or first updated point release of 16.04), you get the GA kernel series as default.

If you install a later point release (16.04.2 or later, released after the next normal Ubuntu release), you get the HWE kernels by default.

Not sure why exactly an apt dist-upgrade would install the GA line later, but if you're already booted from the HWE (4.13) kernel, it should be safe to uninstall the GA series using:

sudo apt remove linux-generic
sudo apt autoremove

This should remove all packages related to kernel 4.4, but still check the list of packages to get removed for any other things you wouldn't want to get rid of.