Ok, as not everyone thing latest kernel is best for old hardware, I want to show an interesting experience that contradicts it a little bit.
I have three old Laptop - IBM Thinkpad T42, with according to current standard are obsolete hardware, two of them have an Radeon RV200 and one RV350 (if I remember correctly) video cards.
I don’t remember exactly, but I think I start on this laptops directly with Ubuntu Mate 16.04 some around its beta release.
So on Ubuntu Mate 16.04 on 2 of these laptops, with RV200, the Shut-down Mate logo have random colors. In very rear occasion you have green on the logo and grey on the background.
So I install Mate 18.04 and that issue disappear , so happy with that, but I have another issue, sometime system does not shutdown. (not mentioning that slow scrolling - with no more further investigation).
I reverted those laptops to mate 16.04 , and surprise when moving from 4.13.xx kernel to 4.15.xx kernel (the one that mate 18.04 has) I get the logo issue fixed and the shut down issue.
So what is very interesting, Is that logo fixed by the kernel issue, everytime I was thinking is some Mate 16.04 related issue, not the video card kernel driver. so that Issue was along all 4.4 to 4.13 kernel, so the first fix discovered in 4.15 kernel, and no other video issue with that laptop on Mate 16.04.
Of course I update kernel on this laptops to latest 4.18 kernel, so probably on 4.16 kernel also the shutdown issue introduced in 4.15 has been solved back.
So is good to have latest kernel if that does not introduce issues, like kernel modules not updated to latest kernel (I don’t use ZFS on those laptops), or userspace hardware related configuration, firmware,…
So when this issues are solved, makes me happy thinking that things on this earth get better and better over time.