[ggreer]

The camera, mouse, and monitor all stayed the same for the tests, but there was a significant difference in latency. Out of the 16 times the experiment was run, only once did Wayland have lower latency. It would be an amazing coincidence if the monitor, mouse, and/or camera were the reason for this.

Figuring out why there's increased latency is a job for software tooling, but I think this guy's experiment is one of the best ways to measure what users care about: The time it takes for an input (such as mouse movement) to result in a change (such as cursor movement).

Note that this doesn't mean that the Wayland protocol itself is the reason for the higher latency. It may be Gnome's implementation (testing with a wlroots compositor might shed light on this). It may be differences in default configuration options. It may be that Wayland and X11 start up different services, and the Wayland helper processes increase load on the machine. But I seriously doubt the reason for the difference in latency was because the same hardware was used throughout the experiment.