I don't know what this has to do with "terminals", other than the author is using this to benchmark this.
According to the author, Gnome 46's Mutter, when in direct mode (which windowed apps do not use, so the benchmark is partially invalid; useful for gamers, but not much else) is faster.
Thats great. Gnome is now possibly as fast as all the wlroots-based Wayland WMs (Sway, River, Hyprland, etc) and KDE's Kwin.
I've looked into why Mutter has historically been the worst WM on Linux for the longest time: it makes a lot of assumptions that "smoother == better", no matter the cost. OSX's WM does the same thing, so they felt justified.
If you lag more than 1 frame, it is noticeable to non-gamers; ergo, a latency of between 16 and 32ms (since WMs do not full-time VRR, although they could, and maybe should) once the app flushes their draw commands; this is on top of whatever the app did, which may also be assuming 60hz.
Modern WMs try to get latency down as far as possible, even implementing "direct mode" which directly displays the fullscreen app's framebuffer, instead of compositing it, thus zero latency added by the WM itself.
Lower latency is not the ultimate goal. Energy efficiency, for example, is another important factor DEs have to optimize for, that can be negatively affected by lower latencies.
Ultra-low latency on a laptop, that will poweroff in an hour is probably a bad tradeoff.
You either check whether any state has changed, doing nothing in the happy path at the price of slightly higher latency, or you just go with the unhappy path all the time.
According to the author, Gnome 46's Mutter, when in direct mode (which windowed apps do not use, so the benchmark is partially invalid; useful for gamers, but not much else) is faster.
Thats great. Gnome is now possibly as fast as all the wlroots-based Wayland WMs (Sway, River, Hyprland, etc) and KDE's Kwin.
I've looked into why Mutter has historically been the worst WM on Linux for the longest time: it makes a lot of assumptions that "smoother == better", no matter the cost. OSX's WM does the same thing, so they felt justified.
If you lag more than 1 frame, it is noticeable to non-gamers; ergo, a latency of between 16 and 32ms (since WMs do not full-time VRR, although they could, and maybe should) once the app flushes their draw commands; this is on top of whatever the app did, which may also be assuming 60hz.
Modern WMs try to get latency down as far as possible, even implementing "direct mode" which directly displays the fullscreen app's framebuffer, instead of compositing it, thus zero latency added by the WM itself.