The input latency that has been driving me crazy lately is the screen unblank latency to allow input to a program.

E.g. I have an old laptop running a browser playing some internet radio stream. Eventually the screen blanker (without locking) activates.

Some real life event makes me want to hit the space bar to pause music. But the modern screen blank has decided that it should eat/ignore key presses while blank. So hitting the key doesn't pause music. I have to wait for the screen to light up before it will be possible to trigger the pause, and this delay feels interminable!

I seem to recall that in the old days the input remained active to the focused window even if the screen was in a power saving state. This power saving was not conflated with screen-lock security etc. I much prefer that. I think this was because DPMS power saving was an underlying X server behavior, not delegated to a screensaver/lock application?

I'd also be partially satisfied with the async behavior of old terminal programs. My inputs should be buffered and processed even if the effects haven't returned to the screen yet. Then I could at least hit keys twice and be trained to know that one would unblank, the other would pause, and all would be well (eventually).

The current behavior is like having a temporarily numb hand, and being frustrated waiting for sensation to return before I can operate anything!

Question, does your monitor have a KVM? Cause I definitely notice this behavior, even on windows and os x with my monitor. I believe it was the same way on linux as well but it's been a minute since I used linux on my desktop