Back when I was using Arch Linux and still did a lot of desktop-experimenting, I tried linux-zen out of curiosity.

I did not do any benchmarks, as I wanted to know if I can notice anything. I did not feel any difference. Maybe it was because I did not play the most pc-stressing games, maybe there was no difference because my hardware was relatively new, maybe it was because most of my games were more GPU-limited then CPU-limited, I do not know. All I can say is, there was no difference for me to notice in my gaming sessions, so I switched back to the default kernel.

Currently using Fedora Workstation 42 and linux 6.14.5, still happy with default kernel.

The one I compiled. The benefits are not that obvious. If you are not into that sort of stuff, I would not recommend it.

But yes, if you don’t support as wide of a range of hardware, you can usually squeeze a bit more performance out of your kernel.

Although, most processing time is spent not in kernel code. There will be a difference of course, especially if you know where to look for it, but nothing groundbreaking most of the time.

I read somewhere about it, might have been phoronix. Information about it tends to be stale. I changed kernels and didn’t feel any difference, so went back to vanilla.

I’m on the CachyOS kernel but not for performance reasons.

Also the optimizations only give a positive effect on certain hardware configurations. They’re not a universal cure.