soapbox

With Ubuntu 25.04 I decided to give gnome another try. I've been a fairly hardcore KDE user for the last five years or so but I like to give gnome a whirl every now and then. I just don't agree with the developer's philosophy, where they decide upon how "things should be" and then strip the option to make them how "the user wants it to be". The perfect example is that I need 6 workspaces, or virtual desktops, to work efficiently. Gnome supports that but I can only hotkey bind 4 workspaces. This is outright infuriating and there's zero reason for it to be this way. It's outright user hostility, but I've come to learn that that's synonymous with "the gnome way". This is just an example, gnome is completely infested with this issue since it's not a mistake, it's their design philosophy.

so why do it?

KDE doesn't have this philosophy. If you want to tweak it, if you want to hotkey bind something, heck if you want to change ANYTHING ANYWHERE then you can be darn sure a KDE developer has taken the time to enable you to do that. There's menus to configure other menus, with sub-menus on top of that! It's a tweakers wet dream. But if I love KDE so much (which I do, I'd recommend it over gnome to exactly everyone) then why change? Because most distributions have decided that gnome is supposed to be the default linux desktop experience and I want to keep up with the direction they're pushing it. I will also freely admit that I MUCH prefer the look and feel of gnome over KDE and I'll even go so far as to admit that many, many of the defaults the gnome developers have set align perfectly with how I want things to function for optimal efficiency. The problem is just when our views don't align and they've stripped the options to make it function like I want it to.

input lag with proton / wine

I'll stop moaning about gnome at this point, that's not why you came here so I'll get off my soapbox. What you came here for is input lag when playing wine / proton games. I'll also note that it likely happens much more frequently when you're playing a demanding game that pushes your FPS down, right? It's because gnome has decided to use ibus and ibus has made certain design decisions that link input updates, or their refresh rate, with desktop updates. It feels sort of like the keyboard, or input device, isn't really keeping up with your presses. You hold d to strafe right but when you release it your character keeps strafing right for a while.

the cause

This issue on github is the relevant problem. It's been acknowledged and one of the ibus developers has merged fixes that ought to, well, fix it. But they haven't. The issue persists several versions after those fixes were merged. Highly unfortunate.

the fix

Fortunately there's an easy fix, once you've launched your problematic game (guild wars 2 in my case, it's exceedingly poorly optimized) simply execute "killall ibus-daemon" in a terminal while the game is running. Ibus will be automatically restarted but it will not longer be hooking into your running instance of proton / wine so the input lag will be gone until you restart the game. You can permanently disable ibus or replace it with an alternative, but I just couldn't be arsed. It doesn't happen very often since I don't play that many demanding, or poorly optimized, games. And I'm sure ibus will be fixed eventually. It's just very unfortunate that gnome with ibus is the default linux desktop experience and the one most new linux users will encounter. And a problem like this which outright ruins gaming has been known and not fixed for this many years. It's a very poor first impression of linux.