Hello, community!

Recently I bought the laptop DELL Inspiron 5759 (I have a little bit different configuration). For some reason I faced weird issue with out of the box Ubuntu - it was randomly freezing when I was opening 'About this computer' settings. 

To solve it, i decided to update the system. I'm completely new in Ubuntu, so i was barely aware of any pitfalls with updating between LTS versions. Eventually a number of drivers were broken, sound disappears completely and drivers from 'Additional Drivers' sections were unable to run.

Now I get the system back to the factory image, and everything looks fine so far. However i'm looking for advice regarding updating strategy. Should I update the certified Ubuntu at all? Does it have some unique kernel, that i should not replace by any other kernels? If not, how can I tell if a kernel compatible with my hardware and proprietary drivers or not?

Thanks in advance