LTS just means Long Term Support in case you weren’t aware. It means no new development is happening, but security exploits will be patched as soon as they arise.

If you just want stability, LTS is the way to go. If you want all the cutting edge bells and whistles and are okay with potentially some instability (but probably not much) then use the latest version.

If your device isn’t connected to the internet during general use then I wouldn’t worry too much about updating anything. Security fixes aren’t important if there’s no way to connect to your device.

LTS kernels aren’t more or less stable. Rather, they have been selected by the kernel maintainers to get security fixes backported to them for a certain time.

Ubuntu does the same thing for the kernels on their LTS versions (technically they usually are not LTS kernels since canonical supports them instead of kernel team)

Overall I’d suggest going with what the distro provides unless you have very new hardware, in which case a newer kernel may be required

If you want stability use the latest Debian. The point of those LTS kernels is more and more supporting IoT and other devices you can’t simply upgrade, but you want to keep secure… regular use cases can just usa a stable disto like Debian and you’ll never notice any kernel related issues.

How likely is my system to break with the standard kernel?

Unlikely. Standard releases are still pretty stable.

Do you need those features? If not, go LTS. LTS means you’ll have to update the distro less frequently than latest.

If you want those features, go non-LTS, there’s no other choice. If you don’t want them, go LTS, it’s less of a hassle.

Depends on the hardware you have. The fact you’re asking this means these latest features wouldn’t mean anything to you. I doubt you’d actually notice any difference.

My advice: use the LTS kernel if that’s what your distro provides, only change if you find some hardware not working.

Stability isn’t the same as unbreakability. It just means the update cycle is prolonged.

If you’re worried about your system breaking, go for Fedora Atomic (Kinoite, Bazzite, uBlue, etc.).
It offers a very recent kernel (-> better hardware support, better performance, etc.) and because it’s an image based distro, you can always roll back, so you’ll always have a working and pretty much unbreakable system.

At home it probably isn’t worth it. Servers where changes can break things or is qualified against a specific configuration, more worth it. Often whatever your distro is providing is fine, even things like Ubuntu and soon Mint will be using non-LTS kernels by default.

Unless you’re running a server, no.

I have an LTS kernel as a backup in case something doesn’t work with my main kernel.

Just recently I had an issue where my main kernel had a bug where snap’s can’t start up, so I just restarted into the LTS kernel to use it then restarted back into my main kernel.

I’m running an LTS kernel on my desktop and a non-LTS on my laptop (both machine are running EndeavourOS). Both have been rock solid.

The only instability I’ve had is when I tried running a customised kernel (linux-cachyos)