I have no idea.
I use Mint btw
this post was submitted on 07 May 2025
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Mint 22.1 has 6.8 by default but 6.11 is available. Xanmod 6.14 works, but it disables the screen off and suspend timers
Yeah, I use the one the kernel developers released when I last updated, so at most I'm about a week out of date on my server or a day or two out of date on my non-servers.
Generally special kernels aren't going to perform any better than the main kernel. Actually they will likely perform worse.
The reason is that Linux is constantly being optimized to get better performance. If there were any performance benefits in a special kernel they would be ported to main. Special kernels are designed for very specific use cases.
Thank you.
$ uname -sr
Linux 6.6.88
I have never bothered about alternative kernels. The only time I seriously researched other kernels was when I was considering trying out GUIX about five years ago, but I only felt reassured in using Linux as a result of that research.
Default Tumbleweed one: Linux 6.14.4-1-default
Usually whatever comes stock with the distro—though one device is currently running a custom built kernel with some Linux TV patches because the patches are only available on x86 builds currently, and I've got the tuner that needs them attached to a pi zero 2
You custom built a kernel on a pi 0 v2? You must have next level patience.
Oh no, don't worry I cross compiled it on my desktop! I imagine the pi would crash before it completed the job
Oh damn that's also really cool! I've had a hard time with that and gave up.
Usually just default, but I believe my ThinkPad has zen and hardened as options.
zen has slightly worse battery life, but slightly better performance.
hardened is more secure, but some software (notably Flatpak) cannot run without first running sudo sysctl kernel.unprivileged_userns_clone=1.
Also, my old ThinkPad uses GENERIC (OpenBSD).
I'm using the Arch standard kernel (6.14.5.arch1-1) and have the LTS (6.12.27-1) installed as a backup,,in case something goes horribly wrong.
zen bc i need zen for waydroid
Waydroid isn't dependent on a specific kernel
oh wait what i thought the binder module was not included in the default kernel, huh
i swear it used to be that you had to either use dkms or use zen
It definitely used to be the case, you are right, always had to dkms the binder module.
But it seems they come baked into the kernel nowadays, according to ArchWiki.
Good to know
zen and lts as fallback
iirc zen has a scheduler that is supposed to be better for single user multitask desktop situations, while the regular kernel scheduler is better for server workloads.
Do you have any data to show it actually is better?
Desktop and server workloads aren't that different in practice.
It is very hard to measure responsiveness (which is basically the only thing zen claims to be better at) without a lot of time investment and a high speed camera for frame analysis.
I guess a possible setup would be to run a multicore synthetic workload that takes most of the system resources and measuring the start time desktop applications.
But nobody has done it in a "scientific" way as far as I can see. Besides some hobbyist anecdotal observations:
https://reddit.rtrace.io/r/linux/comments/fh0hc2/its_time_for_desktop_distributions_to_adopt_a/
https://forum.garudalinux.org/t/kernel-benchmarking-results-zen-cacule-tkg-bore/18831/8