Agreed. I've always been a bit confused by the usual 'Power Saver / Balanced / Performance modes' on Windows though. Who selects 'balanced'?... I kinda want performance... I kinda want to save power... not too fussed about either...
Usually a 'power saver/restrict performance' or something more descriptive about what it's actually doing would be good - I'd turn that on when I'm worried about power bills or the fans getting loud.
Also, on that feature, I'd suggest to avoid having power profiles linked to standby/screen off like they often are on Windows. I might be alone on that thought though? I usually choose 'performance' and then manually set the standby/screen off to be a short time like 5 mins separately as there's not much penalty for standby - computers resume near instantly these days.
Having two versions of the same product that do the exact same thing is, in my opinion, a mistake. Splitting efforts like that is simply more work for very little gain, if any. Personally I like the idea of having a Debian based Linux Mint, as well as ZorinOS. But I think that even better than that is having something that works and works well, so I'm all in for whatever the developers are most comfortable with to continue to improve the product.
But even if Zorin were to become Debian based, it's unlikely to be in the next release which is just around the corner.
I am wondering what suprise will be in ZOrin 17.
I mean what we get in this version.
Something what kick "sitting a part body" and will back to top 10.
Curious and propably many people will be testing new version.
To stand against the improvements introduced in Win10 (Only focusing on improvements and not those things that are a detraction):
Zorin OS 17 should consider
4k monitor support
The increase in demand in gaming
Faster boot
More comprehensive and intuitive file management.
Direct Upgrade Option
More communication between development team and the end user. @AZorin and @zorink further information can be found linked in the moderator forum.
I would like to see Kernel 6.1 LTS
I don't have Zorin currently installed cause I need newer Kernels and packages, so I don't know on what Kernel Zorin is right now.
All in all a little bit snappier/faster
And I would like to see auto-cpufreq out of the box (longer battery live for Laptops)
Is it already possible to upgrade from one Major Version to the next?
If not - this as well
Well one good options if Zorin is dedicated on debian resources then in Debian is option when installing that distro we can choose only drivers in kernel hardware what you have connected, that is great not installing any another things what could be heavy for pc.
I seem to remember that ZorinOS already has some gnome extensions installed, perhaps including Rounded Window Corners could be a solution to this issue?
The biggest performance increase I've seen is via:
the low latency kernel
disabling SMT to effectively double L1 and L2 cache per core and to reduce thread-contention jitter
enabling NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Access) balancing.
Offloading RCU (Read-Copy-Update) callback duties to one core (Core 0, since Core 0 can't be parked anyway), leaving the other cores free to continue processing data without continual interruption.
A full no-tick kernel would stop what is happening now... for the generic kernel 250 times per second, and for the low-latency kernel 1000 times per second each core is tickled and thus they cannot sleep... with a no-tick kernel (as Windows and MacOS use) the idle cores could actually be fully parked (0 Hz, no power) rather than just throttling down to 400 MHz. That 'tickle' also invalidates the cache... so 250 or 1000 times per second (depending upon your kernel) right now, the CPU cache has to be read-copied-updated, and that can account for as much as 50% of core workload... getting rid of that tick leaves the cores free to do more work.
In my experimentation, with fully parked cores 1-11 (which I had to do manually... there's no driver to do that yet), even with Core 0 maxed out, my TDP is ~3.8 W (with Turbo Boost turned off), and I don't notice much more lag than a fully-SMT setup. That's what led me to research disabling SMT, and that led me to learn that you gain a few advantages... less thread-contention jitter and larger L1 (384 KB vs. 192 KB) and L2 (3 MB vs. 1.5 MB) caches per core and double the number of transistors per core (so each core can handle more bits faster). So now my machine thinks it's got 6 cores, rather than 12.
In Grub: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="preempt=full tsc=reliable numa=on nosmt=force nohz=1-5 rcu_nocbs=1-5"
My boot is now down to 16.879 seconds... that's roughly twice as fast as the OOTB setup.