My kernel version is ‘6.8.0-87-generic’ and hers is ‘6.14.00-33-generic’. My brother, who uses CachyOS, has kernel version ‘6.17.1-2-cachyos’. So it makes a little sense that the kernel is different. Even though I always thought that there was just one kernel that all Linux versions use.
But why is there a different kernel for the same distro?
Different distros do it differently.
For OpenSUSE it always presents you the latest kernel during updates, and keeps an old version as backup should your system fail to boot on new kernel.