alt Hacker News> Who needs throughput? Server software, but Linux is already dominant there and everyone's happy. For everything else, including desktop and mobile operating systems realtime sounds like a good idea.
No, not at all. The actual question is who needs realtime.
Desktop is a typical place where you absolutely don't need realtime. You just want latency to be under the user perception threshold but that's easily achievable with a standard kernel. Plus the consequence of failing is basically nil. Why bother with the complexity introduced by a RT kernel?
The latency in modern desktop is not a consequence of unpredictable scheduling. It's just poorly optimised applications. A RT kernel is not a magical solution to that.
> Desktop is a typical place where you absolutely don't need realtime.
On a desktop, you want at least soft real-time when playing any sort of multimedia (audio, video, or interactive applications like video games). Otherwise, you get things like glitched audio or dropped frames.