what's the difference between this and the optimised one?
The Official CM rom is maintained by
@Alberto96 and
@intervigil
He makes the very recent changes here relating to performance...which are then in time pushed (even if partially) to CM Official Sources. The kernel is different because it has seLinux disabled and few minor tweaks you might not even notice...this GearCM ROM will have more performance. But CM will have their updated base changes which are included here with each update.
What I mean is you probably wont even notice what's different in terms of user interface. GearCM will have more performance. Official CM will have updated sources. But it will include GearCM's changes in time as
@Alberto96 pushes them to CM
You can decide by a simple choice..more performance and not-nightly updated sources or similar/worse performance (improving with nightly updates) with updated sources. I would choose GearCM because of the reasons i mentioned above. Do what you will...and let this be a note to everybody who ask this again and again and again. Don't spam the thread with same question in every alternate page...because there are other people who might have different problems they need to ask. Read at least 15 previous pages and the first post Changelog before asking the question. Reading most of the times will give you a solution and if not most of the info you will read will help you anyway.