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’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.

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.