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Comment by Ace17 | Hacker News Reader

I totally agree with the need for eliminating tearing from games (and every other application, and increasing the overall smoothness of desktop displays). However, from the article itself, the list of regressions associated with the switch to Wayland seems to be non-negligible ; especially the lack of fast drivers for Nvidia graphic adapters, which makes it unlikely for GNU/Linux-gamers to do the switch.

Is it impossible to fix the tearing and smoothness issues of Xorg/X11?

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During the last year, I've solved tearing from movie playback on three different systems (nVidia discrete, AMD integrated, Intel integrated) by using the "TearFree" Xorg Driver option.

I'm not sure if this also affects the desktop environment (looks like it does from the machine I'm using). If so, this mean s that there is a working solution.

Tearing in games is an entirely different beast, as other factors come into play (most notably, latency) - besides, games have specific option[s] for that.

Add libinput to that list, that currently makes it impossible for me to switch. I just can't reproduce the behavior of synaptics with the options libinput currently offers, and without them my mouse drives me crazy.

Some X drivers can be made to do proper vsync discipline by setting a "NoTearing" option in xorg.conf.

The problems with X go beyond just screen tearing. For example, it's possible for Xorg apps to spy on each other, such as reading keypresses when a user is entering a password.

Something that could have been eliminated without chucking the whole of X. A starting point is the Security extension that introduce the concept of trusted and untrusted X Clients.

Thew basic thing is that different clients can see those inputs because they live inside the same root window. Give each a different root window and the issue "magically" disappears.

Yes, everything can be solved with more extensions, but that approach is part of why X became unwieldy in the first place.

At least in my case most games crash, though it is likely due to using Bumblebee (Nvidia Optimus) and switching between Integrated Graphics and Dedicated Graphics.

The plus side is that I can log into using either Wayland or Xorg. So switching between the two is almost seamless.

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