Hacker News Reader

Comment by kaba0 | Hacker News Reader

A big assumption, but I think you use X with a compositor, which will have no tearing as well. Eg gnome and plasma does use compositors by default.

But in case you just have a very fast computer/smallish resolution and don’t notice tearing, try to watch a video in full screen. This basic functionality doesn’t work with native X, without additional tweaking (like hardware level frame syncing, etc)

View on HN

No, i don't use a compositor, just a regular window manager. And I can watch full-screen video without trouble.

Drag a light color window (empty textpad) with a mouse very rapidly left and right across the dark desktop. You should see the tearing if you don't use a compositor. Tearing looks like the window is made of two unaligned halfs (top half and bottom half). With a compositor, the window is always perceived in one whole piece.

I assume the full window content is visible when dragging, not just a border rectangle as sometimes happens when the compositor is disabled.

Also, not everybody notices it, just like not everybody notices text with bad kerning or individual instruments and percussion elements in a song.

so, this is it. Yes, I do have tearing, especially visible on very large windows. It's a sort of frame refresh glitch, isn't it?

Honestly, I couldn't care less. But then again, I'm extremely picky about bad kerning, bad font hinting, and bad antialiasing. And I could start caring about this also... So now I hate you for ruining my life even more! Fortunately, I never move windows around so I guess I'm still safe with Xorg.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com