When I switched to Linux from Windows last year I noticed I had a lot of keyboard input latency only when gaming. It was like I had ~100ms of input latency and it felt exactly the same as playing old school Quake I on a dial up connection without client side prediction turned on. It's like you're skating on ice with a delay when seeing the output vs when you performed the input. This was despite having a solid 60 FPS.
Turns out it was due to a combination of things.
I was using niri (Wayland window compositor) and this input latency was present with or without v-sync turned on. It happened when I was using a 60hz 4k monitor with an NVIDIA GPU.
Then I tried playing the same game on a laptop (same distro and dotfiles) with an AMD GPU and no external monitor. The delay disappeared.
Then I played the same game on that laptop but hooked it up to the 4k monitor and I had the same keyboard input latency only when v-sync was enabled. When I turned off v-sync and capped my FPS then the input latency was reduced by an amount that I could no longer perceive the delay.
Then I put an AMD GPU in the original desktop I was testing and reproduced the same results as the laptop.
However, when I switched to using KDE Plasma with X or Wayland, the keyboard input latency disappeared. This was with the 4k monitor and both NVIDIA and AMD GPUs.
I reported it to niri but it hasn't gotten traction, I just know I can reproduce it on 2 completely different systems with different GPU vendors and hardware when the common ground is having a 4k 60hz monitor hooked up.
I abandoned Windows for a variety of reasons and while I find Linux better in many ways, the graphics and compositing situation is a bummer. To add another example, I was trying to do a screen recording the other day and it was dropping frames like crazy. I don't know who to blame, whether it's Gnome, or Wayland, or OBS, or Nvidia. But the point is my confidence in the entire ecosystem is low. I have plenty of bad things to say about Microsoft, but I think their track record is quite good when it comes to making low latency input and graphics "just work."
With OBS recordings (not streaming) on Linux I occasionally get situations where short but heavy disk or network I/O will cause my webcam's video to get out of sync with my microphone (separate mic from the webcam). This makes it look like my lips are way out of sync with the video. It's something I haven't been able to track down as there's no errors or side effects posted in journald logs.
This is using vanilla Arch with niri. It happens pretty often and I fix it by splitting the audio and video in my editing tool and then shifting the audio track over half a second or so.
I recorded over 1,000 videos on Windows with the same hardware and the above never happened once.
I've been using OBS on wayland, they got captures working really well a few years ago.
But for VR stuff I've been going back to X11, and I was just last night trying to finish a screen capture program on wayland (w/ kde plasma) and idk I just have to do repeated screenshots ana analyze those > horrible fps, but at least I think I got that working finally after many attempts last year.
Gaming is not really an issue now with DEs that help ppl disable compositions and wine/proton.
This is endemic with open source. Nobody owns the hard bugs, nobody does the systems spelunking, and there is little power to make cross-cutting changes. This is why I use a Mac. Not perfect, but better than that no-accountability midden-heap that is Linux.
Maybe AI coding agents will make the situation better, but because open source maintainers are too dim to understand the complex changes the AI makes, and too poor to have their own AIs to help them, they won't take the changes. I make improvements to open source but am forced to keep them to myself.
Except GP said it works fine with all configurations with KDE, which is what most people should be using. I've been using Linux for 15+ years and have never heard of niri.
Unrelated to Mise but related to zsh, there's also https://github.com/jeffreytse/zsh-vi-mode/issues/316. I noticed this plugin was causing a lot of delay. Learned a decent amount about zsh profiling from that issue.
I'm sure it doesn't help that people continue to buy things at this price.
Steam Deck had a huge price increase (~40-50%) but it still sold out in 24 hours.
All it would take is for everyone not to pull the trigger on buying things for a little bit and prices would fall but instead enough people are buying things at a crazy markup. If anything that's a signal to sell things at higher prices. Of course AI is amplifying this problem but realistically people are still buying consumer hardware at these prices which lets businesses know people will pay this price.
I'm on a machine built from parts in 2014 and it's all very good for me to do every day development so I'm not posting this from a machine I won't have to touch for another 10 years.
I believe Steam Deck is a major exception. Given how fast they sold out I also wonder how many Valve produced this batch. Most vendors of PC parts are seeing steep declines. Also after seeing 2-3 price increases in everything (Switch, Playstation, XBOX, etc.) people are likely getting it now because the prices aren't going down anytime soon and will probably just go up again for a couple of years.
I pulled the trigger on an early Ayn Thor because it was obvious this was going to happen. Something I didn't really want to fit into my budget but knew that if I didn't I would regret it later.
> I'm sure it doesn't help that people continue to buy things at this price.
Implicitly, but that's blaming the consumer who has no or few equivalent choices. Purchasing RAM is not like choosing between Coke and Pepsi. A better analogy is that when a hurricane is coming or a natural disaster has already hit, it doesn't help that people will purchase food and fuel at any price.
People can choose to use online services to game or other various ones for compute. The demand is surely more elastic than food and fuel after a natural disaster. The consumer can also forego any purchases.
I feel like a broken record with this sometimes, but things compared in an analogy are generally dissimilar while sharing some similarities. No one claimed what you are asking.
I doubt it helps but this is such a small piece of the pie I'm not sure how much this hurts things either. Steam Deck is kind of a niche in a niche and doesn't sell in huge numbers compared to other players like PC OEMs and phone OEMs that are now all over a barrel as well as OpenAI tries to buy all the RAM so no one else can have it.
It's funny how out of touch AI is with seeing the big picture of problems.
Here's an example I encountered last week:
Someone in my neighborhood is a 75 year old chemical engineer who likes computers and got into Linux a few months ago. I see him from time to time when walking around, he's a nice guy and overall has a scientist's mindset. He doesn't make a lot of assumptions and tries to think things through but sometimes he has big blind spots in unfamiliar fields.
I helped him install Linux and also hook up an SSD to one of his older machines and now it flies.
On his own he had an old sound card that he wanted to use on that machine. He asked me if the card is compatible. I told him it almost certainly is because the Linux kernel has drivers for a ton of devices. His motherboard's built-in sound card was fine but he likes tinkering with audio in general.
He managed to physically install the card correctly but called me and said there's no sound playing. Then he says he spent 12 hours troubleshooting the issue, using ChatGPT and Googling for assistance.
Over the phone he told me he tried many different things. Installing, tweaking and configuration ALSA, PulseAudio and PipeWire related tools and tweaking everything you can imagine. Nothing worked, no matter what happened, it never played sound through his speakers.
He asked me if I could come over to help so I did.
In 30 seconds I solved the problem.
I went to his sound settings in his desktop environment and saw that his sound card was being picked up. I looked at the back of his machine and noticed this card had 2 black ports with the bigger style jack for headphones. There was no usual green port which is usually used for output. I shined a flashlight to look closer. One of the black ports was labeled headphones and the other was unlabeled. His was connected to the unlabeled one. I swapped it to the other port and everything worked right away.
All of that to say, as a software engineer I have second hand embarrassment that a trillion dollars invested into AI didn't think to respond with "did you double check to see which port you connected the speakers to?". I asked him if AI ever suggested that and he said no, it immediately went into polluting his system with a bunch of unnecessary tools and chasing incorrect rabbit hole after rabbit hole. AI understands nothing.
It's funny how well this reflects the contrast in internet advice between Windows and Linux issues.
All users deserve advice beginning with thorough sanity-checks and potential quick-fixes before having to dig deeper.
Searching about common Windows issues results in misleading blogspam. Suggested "solutions" resemble blindly applied folk remedies.
I'm no stranger to breaking my desktop Linux after an hour of misdirected troubleshooting and desperately messing with core libraries. I'm still glad I can quickly find my way to ArchWiki.
You can get a lot of laptop in the ~$700 range if you look beyond Apple and Framework.
I picked up a Nimo N155 for $570 back in September 2025. Today it's $700 due to RAM prices. Its specs are:
15" 1080p IPS display, AMD Ryzen 7 6800H (8 cores / 16 threads), 32 GB of DDR5 RAM, 1 TB NVME SSD with an iGPU Radeon 680M that can use up to 8 GB of memory all wrapped up into a metal case that weighs less than a MBP. It has a nice feeling backlight keyboard and a pretty good track pad. It comes with Windows 11 but it's all compatible with Linux too. Also it comes with a 2 year manufacturer's warranty.
I've been using it quite a bit since I picked it up. Been running Arch Linux on it since day 1 with niri. It's really solid IMO.
It's no problem. At least in Spain, Portugal and Türkiye as an English speaker. I spent a few weeks solo traveling in those countries.
Sure you will encounter folks who don't speak English but you'll be surprised at how far body language can go along with understanding less than 10 words of their language. If it's important there's Google translate too.
But it's more fun without it. Years later I still have nice memories of chatting with a clerk at a small store to buy laundry detergent for washing clothes in a sink where neither of us knew each other's language. After 10 minutes of laughing and miming out the action of washing clothes we found a good powder that was safe for colored clothes, optimized for sink washing.
Yep, at a place I used to do work for I used their API to build a number of time saving things, all of which were tiny shell scripts.
Like adding a custom text field to each ticket with a human description of what a ticket did which someone would fill out along with a timestamp that got auto-filled out when a release shipped (deploy script). We'd release 1 ticket at a time as a line of work (many tickets per day). This combined with custom filters resulted in Jira providing us a human readable changelog for each board and the whole company. These messages were Slacked to the business so everyone had a pulse on what was going live. It was also a searchable audit log of all releases, tying back to a code change.
The deploy process also transitioned Jira tickets so a developer never had to do anything more than merge a ticket to main to have it get deployed and completed on Jira.
Lots of little scripts that automatically created tickets for routine tasks, etc..
It was super solid for years and I'm going to guess it's still running today. The naming conventions of the custom fields were lame but if your team is in control of setting up Jira, it wasn't hard to keep everything on the same page.
I started off not liking Jira and it had a lot of issues many years ago but it's actually not that bad nowadays once you set it up. I wouldn't choose it for my own company but as a developer and someone who has administrated it, used it as an end user and developed against it for internal tools, it mostly gets out of your way once it's configured and working.
I've been at places where the AWS annual spend was a real lot of money, let's say way over 100k but not 1 million USD.
Support tickets went unanswered for months, assigned account reps left us hanging for months with multiple follow ups, etc.. All tickets opened within the last 6 months got AI generated responses with massive delays that indicate the ticket wasn't read by a human due to how inaccurate the response was based on the questions asked.
I had an obscure KMS issue a few months ago, I reproduced it and opened a ticket. It was a low severity. A guy emailed me back in about 4 hours, acknowledged it and thought I was doing it right. Came back 2-3 days later noting that it was a bug, and would be fixed in a few weeks. As a workaround he updated my script with a less obvious/efficient solution to get me through.
It can be two things. People’s main complaint about Google’s cloud services is that you are forever at the risk of an automatic and unappealable ban of your whole account.
My desk is only 48" wide (4 feet / 1.2 meters) and 30" deep (76 cm). This is enough space to have a massive mouse pad with a full sized keyboard and mouse on it with enough space to the right of it to comfortably sit and work with physical items. The desk also has a 32" 4k monitor and a 27" 1440p monitor, a rack sized audio processing unit, a USB audio interface and easy access to a drawing stylus. I don't even have monitor arms either to save space, they rest on stands. It's also deep enough where if I wanted more horizontal space I could move my keyboard and mouse forward and have plenty of room to sprawl out a few physical items.
Long story short, what kind of desk are you working with? I would consider my desk fairly small but it has lots of room for common things.
My desk is a tiny bit wider, my displays are smaller, and my keyboard and deskmat are smaller too. My monitor arms do take up a ton of space though and make it hard to temporarily increase my working area by pushing my keyboard back.
If I had the space I'd love to have a writing area as wide as OP's, which looks wider than either of our entire desks.
Another one is how much time it takes to maintain vs how much interest it has. This is different than burnout.
I created and maintain example Docker Compose starter projects for Flask[0], Rails[1], Django[2] and Node[3]. I've had these going for 6-7 years and I maintain them at least once a week to keep everything up to date.
I used to also support Phoenix but I stopped after ~5 years because it was the least popular project but also took up more time to upgrade than all of the other example projects combined because Live View has changed in drastic ways so many times. Plus it became no longer enjoyable to work on it since I stopped using Phoenix in my day to day as well. That combined with it being the least popular example app between the 5 projects made it easy to decide to sunset it.
Turns out it was due to a combination of things.
I was using niri (Wayland window compositor) and this input latency was present with or without v-sync turned on. It happened when I was using a 60hz 4k monitor with an NVIDIA GPU.
Then I tried playing the same game on a laptop (same distro and dotfiles) with an AMD GPU and no external monitor. The delay disappeared.
Then I played the same game on that laptop but hooked it up to the 4k monitor and I had the same keyboard input latency only when v-sync was enabled. When I turned off v-sync and capped my FPS then the input latency was reduced by an amount that I could no longer perceive the delay.
Then I put an AMD GPU in the original desktop I was testing and reproduced the same results as the laptop.
However, when I switched to using KDE Plasma with X or Wayland, the keyboard input latency disappeared. This was with the 4k monitor and both NVIDIA and AMD GPUs.
I reported it to niri but it hasn't gotten traction, I just know I can reproduce it on 2 completely different systems with different GPU vendors and hardware when the common ground is having a 4k 60hz monitor hooked up.
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