I honestly think that if you had the same OS kernel and desk top environment you’d be getting the same or at least similar results.
The choice of desktop environment can affect latency due to the differing resources each consumes.
Gnome is on the heavier side where as xfce is one of the lighter ones.
When I did my respin of Mint I went for the xfce version as a base rather Mate. I tried a few kernels and decide on 4.19.106 as that gave better results than the 5 series available at the time.
Sometimes, probably more so on the lighter machines, the latest distro and kernel isn’t the best option.
Last edit: 4 years 9 months ago by ALittleOffTheRails.
In the case of this machine i suspect your issue is kernel/distro related. When i did my initial work i tried debian 10 and ended up on mint 19.3 for a very good reason.
i have not done any tests on Debian 11(bullseye). I am not surprised it performs poorly. If you are serious about needing bullseye then you might need to look at custom kernel compiles.
I wouldn't be too quick to dismiss the T610. I have Arch linux running on it with similar latency to my Mint 19.3 tests. And when it comes to "modern" or "latest and greatest" not much is going to beat Arch.