Running on the Low Latency Kernel

with Pop! OS on the System 76 Lemur Pro

Around 3 years ago, triggered by getting a Lenovo X1C6 to replace my Macbook Air, I started tinkering with performance tweaks a bit more than before and one of the things I noticed is that if I use a low latency kernel, at least for my specific type of usage, the overall experience is a bit snappier. Since then, I have used the low latency kernel with Ubuntu on pretty much most of my daily drivers and the experience has been consistently better at least for what I do.

If you are following me here already, you will probably have noticed that I recently switched to a System 76 Lemur Pro as my daily driver and since running an OS made by the hardware vendor has obvious merits, I also went with Pop! OS when I made the switch. So-far, my experience has been great with very minimal gripes which I will save for another post.

One of the main perks of buying a Linux laptop is that it comes optimized and there’s very little to tweak beyond your own personal visual preferences and such. So I have been just running on the stock kernel and had completely forgotten about the low latency option.

A few days ago, as I started reading up a bit on low latency kernels for audio production (what most people need the low latency kernel for) during my nightly wind…