I’ve been using Endeavour OS for about two weeks now and I’m absolutely in love, however one of the first things I did was to switch to LTS kernel instead, I’m just used to always using LTS kernels with pure Arch and Manjaro.
I have used it once for a couple of days until I found out what the real problem was (screen tear after an update). It is good to have a backup (plan b actually) if something goes wrong - but I’m still waiting for anything that isn’t in the fix queue by the time I hear of/experience the ‘problem’
I use the Rolling Kernel and actually this is the first time that i have seen any issues. The 5.8 Kernel was very large and the only issue i have is virtual-box not working installing Arch. It does seem to work installing other Linux distros but not Arch based currently for me anyway. I just switched for now to virt-manager Qemu.
I also wanted to go to the LTS kernel first, since I had done it that way before. But the 5.8 works so well for me that I installed the LTS only as a fallback.
On one of my laptops because of a bizarre external monitor issue that required having the monitor plugged in even if not in use (having a lot of external monitor problems the last few months). Switching to the LTS kernel seems to have solved that.
I’ve always tended to be more of an LTS kernel user. I also use mainline on a couple of computers and I rarely see anything noticeably different in performance or stability.
I’ve started using the linux-ck kernel on my daily driver; I definitely see a performance increase with that kernel on that machine.
I have a laptop that works well with kernel version 4.19, but with any version 5 kernel it has terrible performance. For now, it’s fine to keep it on 4.19, but I’m a bit worried about the future.
On my main laptop I have 3 kernel installed with AKM : the last 5.8, the LTS and the Zen. I switch from one to the other from time to time, just to see if I see a difference but it is more or less the same on this hardware.
It depends a lot of the way you use your hardware, and of the hardware itself.
Today I have boot with the Zen… tomorrow ?
I have seen in a post (don’t remember from who) that the Zen kernel is sometimes more “crispy”, so I installed it to try. I don’t see real difference (but it’s all subjective, I did not run any benchmark) but I like to have more than 1 kernel installed. So I keep it… and use it.
Normally I don’t see any noticeable difference when running a custom/AUR kernel. Only when having a closer look at it and paying close attention do I see differences. Also depends a lot on the hardware and the kernel configuration.
But it’s always a good idea to have more than just one kernel installed, be it Zen or LTS or whatever, gives you an alternative if something breaks on mainline kernel.