June 11, 2026
Mouse drama at 120 frames
Linux latency measurements and compositor tuning
Linux gamers hunt “floaty mouse” mystery and the comments instantly go feral
TLDR: A Linux gamer measured screen delay and discovered that even an idle Zed editor window could make a desktop feel slower. The comments instantly turned it into a messy mix of chart rage, version-policing, and the never-ending NVIDIA-versus-AMD argument.
A Linux gamer went full detective mode after getting haunted by that dreaded “floaty mouse” feeling in games. Armed with a tiny homemade click-to-screen tester, they compared Linux and Windows on two similar machines and found the kind of result that sends comment sections into chaos: one desktop was mysteriously slower, and the villain turned out to be... an idle Zed editor window. Yes, readers absolutely latched onto the idea that a text editor could quietly make everything feel worse, which is exactly the kind of absurdly specific tech drama the internet lives for.
The community reaction was a mix of nitpicking, old-school flexing, and platform tribalism. One commenter was so distracted by the charts that they declared, “These vertical labels make me unreasonably mad,” which honestly became the accidental mood of the whole thread. Another immediately side-eyed the software version used in testing, asking why an older release was tested in June — the classic comment-section move of turning one benchmark into a courtroom cross-examination. Then came the hardware debate: is this a Linux problem, a desktop-environment problem, or just an NVIDIA problem? One user said their NVIDIA machine feels sluggish while their AMD setup feels snappy, even without measurements, basically lighting the fuse for the eternal “my rig feels better than yours” war.
And because no Linux argument is complete without summoning legends, one commenter name-dropped Con Kolivas, the patron saint of low-latency Linux debates, while another casually dropped that they’d already fixed a similar timing issue in GNOME years ago. In other words: the article brought data, but the comments brought the ego, nostalgia, and delicious nerd drama
Key Points
- •The author built a Teensy-based click-to-photon latency measurement rig using a modified open-source LDAT sketch to log large numbers of samples automatically.
- •Tests were conducted on a desktop and laptop with Ada-generation RTX GPUs and Zen 4 CPUs, using near-identical NixOS setups and Windows 11 installs on the same LG C1 120 Hz display.
- •The Linux test environment included KDE Wayland 6.6.4, Proton-GE 10-33, MangoHud 0.8.2, and Nvidia 595.58.03, while Windows used Nvidia Control Panel or RTSS for frame-rate limiting.
- •The author encountered several sources of invalid or misleading results, including LG webOS behavior, KDE Konsole’s wl_shm surfaces affecting compositor timing, and delayed application of V-Sync changes in some games.
- •A synthetic Chromium-based test revealed that the desktop profile added at least 3 ms of latency, and the issue was traced to an open Zed editor window affecting other applications while idle in the background.