I was specifically referring to the down sampling that you refer to on GNOME. I don't think I've seen a linux desktop environment where this isn't the case. The result is that when you drag or resize windows (or have any movement on your screen in general) your cpu/gpu spikes. While I'm sure it's not a huge deal on modern hardware, The performance penalty on my dell xps 13 from 2015 is pretty significant, and it looks like the cpu usage when dragging/resizing windows doubles on linux compared to windows 10, which makes sense. battery life also takes a serious hit. Since no one has seemed to be able to figure this out, I wonder if it's a compositor specific thing? like there's no way to change this behavior without rewriting wayland or something.