As a 25 year user of Linux I love wayland since cutting over to it about 5 years ago. No tearing ever, which I always had to battle with with X. Certain developers that must interact with the Wayland stack will have to do more work now, and some projects may not still be viable, I get it. I've been following the comments in Linux forums for years. But users exist too, and here is one data point for you.
Recently I fixed my X11 tearing by simply running a compositor (compton). Not having a compositor didn't prevent xserver from working but it was tearing. I remember that historically it was a mess, some x11 gpu driver even had a "TearFree" configuration option.
I am still a bit sad that window shading isn't supported. I wonder if I am going to continue saying this until I am like all those people 20 years ago complaining about things they liked in CDE not being available in more modern DEs.
Basically something that us grey beards like in several window managers, it is not supported in GNOME since the version 3.0 reboot, and relates to minimizing a window to the title bar.
You can move the title bar around, and depending on the window manager either double clik to drop down again its contents, or by leaving the mouse pointer for a few seconds hover it, it will temporarly reveal its contents.
Yeah, it took me a while to discover that it was removed from KWin. (I eventually ended up reading the sources). It didn't help that KWin also does 3D effects, so all of my Web searches for "shading" were returning results for "shader" :-(
Another datapoint: I'm a 20+ year off-and-on user of Linux who was never able to switch to desktop Linux for daily use because of the graphics issues. After recently deciding to abandon Windows for good and suffer whatever problems I would have with Linux, I was pleasantly surprised by the experience on Fedora/Wayland/Gnome. No issues with high DPI, per-monitor fractional scaling, tearing, bad performance, etc. which have plagued my Linux experiences in the past. There are still minor issues with Nvidia drivers, but this is very likely the fault of Nvidia and not the OSS community.
Whatever ideological debates there are underneath the X vs. Wayland divide, ultimately what I care about is things working as well as or better than other mainstream operating systems, and Wayland seems to deliver on that.
I haven’t had problems with tearing in x11 for 20 years, with or without compositors, on nvidia, amd or intel.
Each driver spells the TearFree / vsync option differently in the config. They probably should have just enabled it by default, since there is no downside.
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