Is the OEM kernel getting security updates? Then it should be fine.
If you want a specific feature that’s available in the newer kernel, then just try it out. You can select the kernel during boot. If it all works, uninstall the OEM kernel and it should default to the generic one.
Edit: If you want to find out whether you’re getting security updates, I’d check the changelog. It should be somewhere like /usr/share/doc/linux-image-somethingsomething/changelog.gz. The entries there should have a date. If the last security fix is older than a couple of weeks, that would be concerning.
Is the OEM kernel getting security updates? Then it should be fine.
If you want a specific feature that’s available in the newer kernel, then just try it out. You can select the kernel during boot. If it all works, uninstall the OEM kernel and it should default to the generic one.
Edit: If you want to find out whether you’re getting security updates, I’d check the changelog. It should be somewhere like
/usr/share/doc/linux-image-somethingsomething/changelog.gz. The entries there should have a date. If the last security fix is older than a couple of weeks, that would be concerning.