In the use case they were pushing for consumers, accelerating a hard drive, it was pretty much indistinguishable from cheap flash.

Optane had great potential for big databases, but you're not running a big database.

It also had very interesting potential for supplementing memory, as a very low latency place to store bulk data. But then the Optane DIMMs ended up being just as expensive if not more expensive than actual RAM. So outside of certain niches, especially because of how narrow the compatibility was, just spend the money on more RAM.

That was probably a hybrid optane setup, like the h10 ssd. It was a tiny optane ssd and a normal ssd on the same m.2 card. Not very good compared to real optane. A really noticeable improvement when running apt, or dnf, or any windows program install.

I also had one. 1tb+octane cache.

It actually was a net decrease in performance! The reason is that first writes would saturate the cache SSD. Then the octane driver software must manually flush the cache to the main SSD.

What happened was that the laptop CPU actually heated up faster doing this, and reached throttle temps sooner.

I disabled the optane function and the performance increased to something typical.

No your laptop did not come with a pure optane SSD; it came with a 32GB optane cache. The former's retail price was thousands of dollars while the latter was a joke