A lot of distros enable ZRAM by default. Some don't (such as Ubuntu apparently). If not, no effect

Otherwise, the worst case scenario is thousands of times improved latency, and improvements across the board

This means faster response time. For gamers, this might mean less stutters. For DJs it might mean the music doesn't skip.

It's hard to know what impact on which apps. It might be negligable, and memory constrained systems with fewer cpus are probably the biggest winners. But if the benchmarks don't have regressions elsewhere, every system will benefit

In practice though, I'm seeing so many posts for kernel 7.4 with huge improvements, that it seems that kernel 7.4 will be overall noticeably faster for most it feels like

And whilst the FuckAI crowd would moan about it (and I'm not really a fan of AI), in reality, many of these optimisations were likely caught by AI making test harnesses and benchmarking sections of code, analysing the profiling data and identifying slow algorithms.

I use it on SBCs like raspberry pi to not write swap to the microsd. If it gets faster I won't complain but they literally only drive my 3d printer and host the web interface and gcode uploads so I probably won't notice

I have never used zram, so for me, no.

I don't know if there are any distros that set it up out-of-box, and I'd guess that a lot of people won't use it if it isn't set up for them by default.

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This guy in a 2023 thread on Reddit says that Fedora has it enabled out-of-box.

https://www.reddit.com/r/lowendgaming/comments/13d5brx/enable_zram_on_low_end_linux_machines_for_a_free/

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https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/SwapOnZRAM

Fedora Workstation has included zram since July 2019 (Fedora 31) by default. Any clean installed systems from that point will automatically be upgraded to this feature.

Fedora IoT has included zram from the beginning. All systems will automatically get this feature upon upgrade.

That feature targeted Fedora 33. I'm not familiar with the Fedora changes wiki thing, so I don't know whether it actually went into Fedora 33 or not.

It's really aimed at systems that are running on a small amount of memory and are hitting swap. My systems don't really hit swap. But if you are swapping, it generally lets you reduce the amount of swapping in exchange for some more CPU usage.

I use it on a mini PC running Alpine Linux used as a router. It significantly increases the performance of Blocky when it’s importing tens of thousands of hostnames to block.

The PS3 made good use of 256mb of ram