Hard to be a 733T h4x0r with all that latency dragging you down.
I gather that the “desktop” is a Chromium browser window. Sooo… You type a key, the browser hands to javascript that it’s running, that goes to a nodejs server, that processes it, executes the actual command, takes the output, processes it, squirts it back to the browser, which processes it with javascript, tells the browser to redraw…
Ta da!
When operating systems were designed with a specific set of hardware in mind the need for a hardware abstraction layers didn’t exist. Latencies could be very low.
To make a comparison to those older machines to todays hardware, you’d need to look at video game consoles. The operating systems on those consoles were created and optimized to run on a specific set of hardware. It makes a world of difference when compared to the general use, multi OS capable personal computers we are used to.
That’s not the whole story though. Some modern keyboards are very fast, others are up to five times slower. The entire tech industry has been coasting on “we don’t need to worry about making latency lower” for far too long. Slow hardware that’s billed as being fast (the pathetic scores for “gamer” keyboards in the below link) doesn’t help matters any.
Of course it’s not the whole story. But moving from hardware specific operating systems is the foundation upon which much of your latency is built. Here is another article that goes a bit more in depth. In short, pressing a key involves much more than writing a character on the screen.
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