but shit like this really grind my gears 
Like, the “start menu” -> type in name of program workflow is so awful. “ter” should become Terminal (Konsole)?? “settings” should return System Settings, not fucking KDebugSettings.
GNOME just works so much better, and literally the only reason I stopped using it is because I want my games to screentear. And the patch to enable that is taking forEVER to land.
Yeah so I have always pretty much only played competitive shooters where less input lag is a priority. Having the frame on screen delayed by varying amounts hurts my head
Non-first person games are fine I don’t need tearing
This is a solved issue these days with adaptive sync. You can have all the reaction time without screen tearing. Any modern monitor with a fast refresh rate will generally do this if you let it (turn on the option).
I can say though that the implementation of adaptive sync is not 100% perfect on Linux. My Freesync display flickers visibly on all the major DEs and WMs with adaptive sync enabled, looks fine with it off, and it worked normally on windows when I tested that without a flicker. But it’s almost certainly some specific quirk of my hardware
My experience was thankfully completely positive. I turned it on once, never thought about it again. It just works. I happen to have G-Sync monitor, obviously paired with an Nvidia GPU, but still. I’m also very sensitive to tearing, so getting a higher refresh rate with gsync was the main reason for getting a new monitor at all, to finally be done with tearing (over a decade ago by now).
Playing old competitive games really is like that sometimes. Having to run a winxp vm to play starcraft broodwar on a third party matchmaking client with 0 input lag is the furthest I’ve gone but that was long ago