Comment by femto
It's every so slightly slower, but the difference is negligible and won't be noticed on a desktop machine. These days, I just run the (Debian) real-time kernel as a matter of course on my everyday machine.
I haven't objectively tested it, but my feeling is that it actually makes for a nicer user experience. Sometimes Gnome can briefly freeze or feel sluggish (presumably the CPU is off doing something) and I feel that the RT kernel does away with this. It could be a placebo effect though.
> It's every so slightly slower
in what way? I'd say responsiveness is more important to the desktop than raw performance and from my experience with nearly 2 decades of using Linux desktops, responsiveness has never been great.
If I'm switching between windows whilst encoding a video in the background, the window manager should have instant priority even if it means starving the background task of some CPU time. on GNOME this is quite bad, run a very heavy task (e.g. AI) in the background and the desktop will start to suffer.