I've recently tried to install Ubuntu 18.04 LTS on Oracle VM VirtualBox, cause I wanted to give this version of Ubuntu a chance. So far, I was using Ubuntu Mate 16.04 which caused no trouble at all.
The first thing I noticed with Bionic Beaver was that the input lag is particularly high: I know the virtualization slows down the operating system, but it was not this much on Mate desktop environment. After some testing, I came up with these results on the two platforms:
- ~ 0.15 seconds of input lag with Mate desktop when using text editors like VSCode or Atom
- ~ 0.30 seconds of input lag with Gnome desktop on the same programs, and even on the default terminal
My question is:
- is it possible that all the difference is related to the desktop environment I use?
- if so, is there any tricky way to sensibly reduce the input lag (maybe without changing environment :P) ?
Further details
- Dell XPS 13 9370 on Windows host
- Both run with 4 processors, 4GB of RAM, 64MB for graphics and 3D Video Acceleration enabled
...and yes, I've tried out VMWare and the differences still remain.