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Comment by blunte | Hacker News Reader

So it's not just my imagination. My 2014 MBP feels reasonable, but my 2017 XPS 15 (top spec) Linux machine feels way, way slower. I've wondered if I somehow made poor choices in my Ubuntu config (maybe so), but now I realize it could just be in the hardware.

This reminds me of the current state of the web. There's been such a push to add more and more to pages, largely without regard for performance, that many sites take 10+ seconds to load the first time on 4G or wifi on a new, top spec Android phone. This is one area where Apple still has one of Steve Jobs's best contributions - an attention to user feel and perception. As much as I prefer an Android, iPhone just _feels_ faster.

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I'd say Ubuntu out of the box is very bad at defaults (bells and whistles turned up, Unity or Gnome don't help in the least)

For minimal latency I would go for Xfce/Gnome 2 without compositing

Thanks. I'll give it a try!

Try the tty (ctrl+alt+f1) and see how quickly your inputs respond, its amazing how X11 and wayland (especially) add so much latency

Apparently this is it. tty is very fast, although since I have a 4k screen the drawing/scrolling rate is very slow.

I recently switched from whatever Ubuntu 17.10 is using (Gnome on Wayland?) to i3 on X.org, and there was no real performance increase that I could see.

Do you have any suggestions on how I can get a tty level experience (with the occasional ability to use a web browser), but with low latency? I obviously can't use tty when the screen is native resolution (and the text is miniscule in size).

> although since I have a 4k screen the drawing/scrolling rate is very slow.

Add "vga=normal nomodeset" to your kernel parameters, and revel in the speed (and blockiness of the font). :)

Personally, over the years I find the LXDE to be the most pleasant environment. It puts all those Gnome3, Wayland, KDE atrocities to dust. Haven't tried any other recent DEs, since once I got my hands on LXDE I had no need.

Just now I checked the input response in tty and terminator, and I just don't feel any difference at all.

That's mostly not X11, but fancy DEs with fancy DE-oriented apps. Try some lightweight window manager with xterm.

This, definitely. Even on Gnome, using xterm is far more responsive than the default gnome-terminal. I switched years ago because of how much a difference it made for me.

Also try KDE Plasma with default settings, see my other comment.

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