Here's why Ubuntu 19.10 Feels Insanely Fast & Responsive (Forbes)

[Jason]

Forbes has a short piece talking about some of the performance enhancements that makes Ubuntu 19.10 fast even if run from a USB stick.

Has anybody here tried out Ubuntu 19.10 and noticed any increase in speed?

I didn't even realize until now that 19.10 was out. Where are you Ubuntu fanboys when I need you?

I'm also thinking some of these changes that don't have to do specifically with GNOME will speed up sessions with Ubuntu derivatives like my beloved Kubuntu. I use an nVidia driver and that's one of the performance enhancements.

[fox]

I have Ubuntu 19.10 installed on my home iMac, my Dell xps, and my office 5k iMac. (The latter on an external drive.) All were installed as upgrades to 19.04. It works very well on the home machine and laptop, and does seem faster. On my 5k iMac it did something weird. Using the 5.3 default kernel, it runs into errors that I could not troubleshoot. It takes about 5 minutes to boot up, and the shut-down is almost as bad. This occurred repeatedly. On a hunch, I tried booting up using the 5.0 kernel (remaining from 19.04) and it booted up and shut down without problem. Note that it is running in xorg, not Wayland, and my video cards are AMD, not nVidia. The home 2011 iMac works OK with Wayland, but expanding windows in a number of applications gives a temporary thick black border on the side of the expanded window. (Video card is old - Radeon HD 6730M.) Wayland won't work at all on the newer iMac, but it never did.

[Jason]

Curious, Fox. I guess it makes sense since I think you mentioned before that your Mac 2011 seemed to like a particular kernel version. One of the pluses with Linux Mint is that you can easily switch kernels and add or remove kernel versions quite easily. I suspect it's not even the kernel per se, but the way that it is configured.
If it was customized so that the Intel driver didn't load, you'd likely have no issue at all. But this would be hard to do aside from downloading the source code, customizing it and then compiling it. It's not an exercise for the faint of heart though there was a time when men were men and built their own kernels, the way Jedi were required to built their own lightsabers. 

I haven't personally had any issues where the kernel actually mattered although there have been times in the past with Ubuntu (wasn't using Kubuntu back then) that if I didn't install the nVidea driver within 10-15 minutes after installing, the OS would freeze up solid. I never had this happen with other Ubuntu derivatives at the time - I think I was using Ubuntu MATE at the time. So rather than just a kernel it was probably just an interaction between X.org and the desktop environment.

Since Ubuntu has been including nVidea drivers built-in and automatically installed for at least a couple of versions, it's not something I think I'd have to be concerned with anymore.

[fox]

Curious, Fox. I guess it makes sense since I think you mentioned before that your Mac 2011 seemed to like a particular kernel version. One of the pluses with Linux Mint is that you can easily switch kernels and add or remove kernel versions quite easily. I suspect it's not even the kernel per se, but the way that it is configured.
....

Ironically, it's the newer iMac (the 2015) that had the issue with the kernel. This Mac has been picky about kernels since I got, but the problem up until now is a new kernel, not an old one. But switching kernels in Ubuntu is no problem. I can install almost any kernel I want by going to Synaptic. In this case though, the kernel I needed was already installed by Ubuntu 19.04 and not removed by the upgrade.