The surprising thing here is that this is the Ubuntu terminal. Indeed, each keystroke goes through the input driver, to USER32, through the console code, to the terminal process in question. But then it goes through a virtual input device, across the VM boundary (which, on Windows is a VM exit plus an entry), through the Linux input driver, into dash (or whatever Ubuntu uses these days), and then all the way back out again, and then it gets rendered.

The fact that this whole dance is faster than notepad.exe suggests that Linux is doing pretty well, that MS’s hypervisor stack is performing well, and that the fancier MS frameworks are really quite slow.

(To be fair, the GNOME Wayland stack has recently been upgraded from awful to sort-of-decent latency-wise. It’s all too easy to design a system where latency wasn’t a primary consideration from day 1 and to have a very hard time improving latency after the fact.)