My download speed is 500Mbps (mistyped in orginal post, sorry!) , upload is 50Mbps. I do get these speeds, sometimes faster.

I have tried with smart queues on and off - does not seem to make a material difference. It’s odd because I would not have expected the use of a VPN on a client machine (i.e. the tunnel is from my laptop and my VPN provider) to have this sort of latancy issue on the local network.

I am also thinking that maybe my ISP is detecting and throttling VPN traffic? I am in the UK - is this a thing?

Agree with this, I have just built a new gaming box (first time in 10 years - wow stuff has changed!). Anyway, I daily drive Fedora on my laptop and just automatically put in on the new rig - it took a LOT of tweaking to get it right for gaming (working like a dream now). In hindsight Nobara sounds like it would have saved me a lot of time

It’s just another human being wanting to communicate to others something they found interesting and enguaging, you don’t need to read it (indeed you probabally didn’t since you are ignoring these sort of posts, which is totally fine and your own decision). Your preference not to read these sort of titles does not mean other peeople do not want to, or, in fact, that those same people are interested reading your views on the topic - live and let live, just don’t be rude about it.