Currently there's a big rise in gaming distributions such as CachyOS or Bazzite. The problem with CachyOS is that it is bleeding edge (with possibly zero-day bugs) and that Bazzite uses an Atomic desktop environment. I think there's an opportunity for Zorin to also make some sort of a "gaming/productivity" OS which entirely focuses on the system performance.
I'm currently using Zorin 18 Core and I use my desktop for productivity and gaming. I do use an AMD GPU and CPU.
The destkop is pretty stock, but I did some customizations on the back-end:
- Swapped the Ubuntu kernel with latest stable Xanmod kernel with improved CPU scheduling, etc. The Xanmod kernel release is in line with the current Linux kernel. Newer kernels ship: Improved drivers (e.g AMDGPU, Valve contributes alot to the kernel by making GPU-driver improvements e.g: Fixing AMDGPU's VRAM management for low-end GPUs | pixelcluster's GPU blog) These kernel patches are usually not found in kernel LTS releases. More info on what Xanmod does can be found at: XanMod Kernel
- Running latest MESA stack (Stock Zorin runs 25.x releases, the newest is 26.x)
- ZRAM Memory compression: This turns a piece of your RAM into a compressed swap space.
These small modifications gained me a 5%-20% performance increase in some scenario's such as gaming. With gaming especially in the %1 lows.
I think it would be a great idea for Zorin to create another fork which ships with the latest kernel patches (inspired by kernels such as Xanmod), latest MESA stack and additional tooling such as ZRAM for memory compression. This fork would be purely for the power users such as gamers and productvity users (Coding, video editing, etc) who need the latest system patches and keep the software stack in line with the LTS release cycle.