How do stop Ubuntu 20.04 from upgrading to the 5.8 hwe kernel?

I need my Ubuntu to be stable as I rely on it heavily for my business and uni. I needed to update my google cloud sdk so I run sudo apt upgrade as I have done for the last year with no issues. After reboot, my dual screen monitor stopped working and the main display freezing and I lost access to my virtualbox.

I am losing about $50 an hour while this is broken so I am happy to pay some one $100US an hour so I can have a stable system again. Is it possible to stop Ubuntu from upgrading the kernel itself?

Really angry actually that Ubuntu would release such a broken and untested kernel on an LTS system.

It is easy to stop Ubuntu 20.04 from installing the 5.8 kernel.

Remove HWE meta packages by running:

sudo apt remove linux-{image,headers}-generic-hwe-20.04
sudo apt install linux-generic

If you also remove the already installed 5.8 kernel packages, it'll stick with the 5.4 kernels. They will get updates (bug fixes and security) till the end of life of the 20.04 release.

This latest 5.8 update has caused a lot of issues for a lot of people. The most critical being breaking:

• Graphics Drivers
• Virtualbox no longer working. You can fix this by downloading straight from virtualbox.org but then that breaks Python.
• WIFI Stops working

I solved this issue and future instability by disabling the HWE track and sticking to the GA Kernel 5.4.

As per here. Disable HWE and continue with GA kernal of 16.04?

Reference:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Ubuntu/comments/ks9lb9/was_the_hwe_kernel_upgrade_to_version_58_supposed/

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