Linux desktops certainly handle low-resource environments well, particularly compared to Windows, but even so it has some omnipresent elevated latency relative to late 90s/early 00s commercial operating systems, which can be felt even on powerful hardware.
It’s hardly a dealbreaker and not even really a problem (which is probably why it’s still there) but making software instantaneous does wonders for improving how it feels to use.
Slow CPUs and GPUs work much better on Linux than on Windows, but when the problem is a shortage of RAM, Windows will hold out much longer before grinding to a halt.
In an era of soldered-on RAM, this is becoming a rather annoying problem. Unfortunately, Linux doesn't offer the same APIs Windows does to take preventative action before running out of RAM. Windows' auto-growing page file also makes for a less crashy experience than Linux' static swap partitions (or constant-size pagefile). Plus, Windows comes with memory compression (zram/zswap) out of the box, configured to use both memory compression and disk swap to catch these situations.
I wish Windows wasn't such a slog on the CPU and GPU because making Linux work in low-memory situations is an absolute pain.
> making software instantaneous does wonders for improving how it feels to use.
When you phrase it like that, I'm actually more surprised Linux suffers from the extra latency. When most software is written to scratch an itch and optimization beyond "works on my machine" is for fun, you'd expect latency to evaporate over time
It’s beyond my realm of expertise so I can’t speak confidently, but my hunch is that many of the responsiveness papercuts are cross-domain in nature, which makes them more difficult to track down and fix (not to mention makes who’s responsible for fixing them more murky).
Another big chunk likely comes down to the tradeoffs all the big DEs have made in favor of making development easier or improving DX. This is understandable but at the same time it would be nice if at least one took a hardline stance towards commiting performance reductions and placed responsiveness as a chief concern, much as the operating systems of yesteryear did.