real time kernel: benefits

There are quite a lot of desktop-ish applications that can benefit from RT. The most common example is anything doing low-latency audio or video - JACK, PulseAudio and PipeWire will all make use of RT scheduling if it's available, which makes it possible for them to work reliably with tiny I/O buffer sizes to minimise processing latency. Other kinds of signal capture and processing benefit from RT scheduling too - I've used it for software-defined radio, and for ld-decode RF signal capture.

I've run RT-patched kernels on my desktop and laptop machines since 2007 or so, and they've always worked really well - it's great to see the last of the work finally making it into the mainline kernel!