[RamRodification]

As a competitive old school arena FPS guy, I have also had a very hard time getting the same smoothness and low latency (input, output, whatever it is) on Linux. The games I play are very fast and twitchy, and milliseconds matter.

There seems to be too many layers and variables to ever get to the bottom of it. Is it the distro itself? Is it a Wayland vs. X11 thing? Is it the driver? The Proton version? Some G-SYNC thing? Some specific tweak that games based on this game engine needs?

[cobar]

I've had better luck since the switch to Wayland. I don't play many FPS games but mouse input & overall smoothness for strategy games has been great. Check your mouse settings, you might need to set a higher USB sample rate. Piper is a frontend for adjusting them.

[RamRodification]

Thanks! I have not put much effort into mouse settings.

[bigyabai]

> Is it a Wayland vs. X11 thing?

Yes, most likely. Without a compositor I get lots of stuttering on x11, whereas KDE and GNOME's wayland sessions are both buttery smooth out of the box.

Might be my Nvidia GPU, but I've never gotten x11 to work flawlessly for gaming.

[simoncion]

> Without a compositor I get lots of stuttering on x11... Might be my Nvidia GPU, but I've never gotten x11 to work flawlessly for gaming.

Weird. I don't use KDE's compositor, and -AFAIK- WindowMaker doesn't have one. When in either KDE or in WindowMaker I don't have stuttering with either fullscreen, borderless "fullscreen", or windowed games... everything is as smooth as it is in Windows. Having said that, I do know that -when using KDE- some fullscreen games get jittery as all shit if a notification pops up and remain that way until the notification disappears. I expect that that performance problem would go away if I was using the compositor... but I don't want to spend the VRAM on it.

I use AMD graphics cards, so it might be an Nvidia thing that you're seeing. It also might be a "Your Linux distro simply stopped shipping good xorg installs" thing. I'm running Gentoo Linux which continues to ship updated versions of xorg and supporting software. [0]

[0] I've heard people running Debian and Debian-derived distros report X11 behavior that absolutely does not match what I've been seeing for years... so some percentage of the "X11 can't do $THING" when it really, really can must be coming from distros that ship either dramatically out-of-date or severely crippled xorg installs.

[hparadiz]

X11 has basically no development anymore. That means regressions are entirely ignored.

I switched my Gentoo box from X11 to Wayland three years ago at this point.

It's shocking that people still install X11 as a default in 2026 except with very old hardware.

[simoncion]

> X11 has basically no development anymore.

Odd. Every few months, I see a new xorg-server version in my distro's package manager.

> That means regressions are entirely ignored.

Should I ever actually have a problem, and it's something that I can't (or CBA to) fix, and my distro's maintainers don't want to try to fix (and then tell me that upstream will never fix), then I'll look more closely at XLibre. XLibre may or may not be a dumpster fire at that point, who knows? If it is a dumpster fire, then I'll look around for other alternatives.

> It's shocking that people still install X11 as a default in [TYOOL]

Nah. It works fine for what I'm doing. I don't do anything that depends on Wayland. The shocking thing would be if I were to waste a ton of time chasing the new shiny... especially when those responsible for the new shiny have been lying for the past 10+ years about how it's ready for everyone's general use. [0]

[0] Perhaps it's ready now, after nearly eighteen years in development. I can't rely on the statements of those responsible for the project to tell me, and I CBA to go searching for (and evaluating the trustworthiness of) information on the topic.

[hparadiz]

> Odd. Every few months, I see a new xorg-server version in my distro's package manager.

Yea these are security updates but the eco system requires a lot of desktop manager scaffolding in user space. That has basically stopped. It's baffling why you would run X11 today. The X11 emulation layer for Wayland works great too by the way.

Just as one example when you screen share from discord or zoom or Google meets there's now a pop-up that asks you to select the screen or window you wish to latch on to for streaming. This provides some security. With X11 anything can just take a screenshot at any time. Sure that's convenient but so many apps don't even support X11 anymore. As someone that made the switch three years ago I get how you might think the old system is better but in reality you haven't tried the new one so you don't really have a way to compare. I noticed so many quality of life fixes that I can't even imagine running X11 anymore.

[simoncion]

> It's baffling why you would run X11 today.

As I mentioned:

  It works fine for what I'm doing. I don't do anything that depends on Wayland.

> Sure that's convenient but so many apps don't even support X11 anymore.

Really? If true, I don't seem to run any of them. I've certainly not noticed anything I've been running over the past couple of decades suddenly stop working on X11. Given that QT, GTK, FTLK, and other cross-platform GUI toolkits support X11, these must be particularly special programs.

> Just as one example[, screensharing...]

Sure, it is a bit nicer to be able to control which windows which other programs can see. I've been watching the slow-moving, many-years-long shitstorm that has been "actually get screensharing that works the way ordinary people need it to". It's been quite a show.

Thing is, I do know that the X Access Control Extension was standardized in ~2006 and updated through 2009 with the aim to make additional fine-grained access control modules [0] easy. I don't know how long it would have taken to use what existed (or even write something new) and update the major Desktop Environments with tooling to manage it... but I suspect it would have taken far less than seventeen years.

> I noticed so many quality of life fixes...

I'm sure that were I 16, I'd believe that I cared very much about that. Now, -mumble decades later- the fanciest things I want are OpenGL and Vulkan support with performance at least on par with what you get from Windows, a window manager that lets me Alt+mouse-button to move or resize a window, functioning global hotkeys that I can command to run arbitrary programs (and that I can permit any arbitrary program to hook into... permanently), and functioning screen-sharing (that can I can permit any arbitrary program to hook into... permanently). And it's so, so silly for me to feel the need to mention anything other than Alt+mouse-button. You'd think that the rest would be "table stakes", but the Wayland development process has demonstrated that many folks disagree.

[0] Ones that could -for instance- prevent undesired keyloggers and screenshot tools

[eertami]

I know what you mean, though I have a device running SteamOS though and it runs extremely smoothly, the latency is no different than my windows PC (on titles where it can achieve the same framerate).

I'm sure that it must be possible to replicate whatever optimisations SteamOS has on other distros, but unfortunately I am not sure what those are exactly.

[simoncion]

> The games I play are very fast and twitchy, and milliseconds matter.

Out of curiosity, what games are those? I wonder if I also play a subset of them.

[RamRodification]

The Quakes! Quake Live and Quake Champions mainly.

[simoncion]

Ah. Yeah, I play games very much like that (but not those specific ones). I also play rhythm games, which require precise timing.

Like this guy mentions [0], for all but one of the games I've tried, [1] I see comparable or superior performance to Windows.

I'm running AMD hardware, and I'm using KDE without a compositor on Xorg (that is, not on Wayland). I strongly expect that I've successfully disabled KDE's compositor because I seem to get the same performance when I use WindowMaker, which has never had a compositor.

[0] <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46799656>

[1] That game is the Deus Ex that takes place in Prague... I think it's Human Revolution. It's mind-boggling how slow it is.

[RamRodification]

Thanks for sharing

[simoncion]

Sure?

[hparadiz]

You should only ever be using Wayland from now on.