alt Hacker NewsIt's like the "oh no, X11 suffers from tearing video" problem that they pull out all the time. (A) I have no idea what "video tear" is and (B) I play video all the time on my crappy laptop running X11 and it seems fine for me. But can I ssh to my remote server and run emacs or another program completely transparently yet with Wayland? Nope. I do that with X11 continuously.
Replies
I used to see it all the time on X11. I'd see it on YouTube/Firefox. I'd see it on VLC. I'd see it on MPV. Any video player, playing any fast paced video you'll see X11 struggle to keep up with drawing full frames that it'd just give up and draw half of one frame and another half of another frame and call it a day. The Intel driver luckily had an xorg.conf setting I could add to make this less of an issue -- I guess it'd turn on some internal Intel driver logic to skip frames or something else if it wasn't able to draw the entire video frame in time for display. However as soon as Debian made Wayland the default this issue 100% disappared and I no longer needed to edit a conf file to make my display work correctly. This is hands-down the singular reason I love Wayland. It just works without any faffing around as Windows, MacOS, etc has done since the mid 1990's. Wayland has achieved more in 5 years than X11 has done in the last 25 years.
I've seen video tearing on X. Usually it doesn't happen, often it's hard to notice anyway; and when it did happen and was annoying, I just was missing some setting or other. No big deal.
> But can I ssh to my remote server and run emacs or another program completely transparently yet with Wayland? Nope.
Yes, you can! Waypipe came out 6 years ago. Its express purpose is to make a Wayland equivalent to ssh -X. https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe/
If someone shows it to you, you'll recognize it. It's when one frame shows part of the prior frame and part of the next. It's most visible in moderate speed horizontal pans as an interruption in vertical lines in the picture.
It's nice to not have tearing. But IMO the functionality loss vs X11 isn't worth it for anything but a dedicated media playback/editing device.
Worst was with the discussion about Wayland having extra latency on mouse pointer movements. The explanation there was that X11 used HW pointer device that got updated as soon as there was a change but that might lead to gasp occasional pointer tearing. So better add a couple ms of latency to everything in Wayland and sample the mouse pointer position once per frame.
FWIW, I do see screen tearing on my X11 multi-monitor setup. I just don't care.
It depends on the game/application and what you are running and your distro may have enabled TearFree for you. I use Debian and it isn't enabled by default.
If I was to play Dark Souls 3 and/or Elden ring on Linux without tearfree. There is significant screen tearing and the game feels very choppy when playing.
To enable TearFree on Xorg. You typically make a new configuration file that sits in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/ and append to the X configuration
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/AMDGPU#Tear_free_rendering
There are downside to this, but I would only imagine they are problems on older GPUs.
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/518362/whats-the-do...
I've never noticed these downsides personally and everything seems to work great.
I don't like Wayland. It still seems very buggy and I am running Debian Trixie and would prefer to keep using X11.
But IME Wayland does have higher performance on older hardware it seems than X. My old laptop could barely play Youtube with X11 (it is the video itself not YouTube being a resource hog, I checked), Wayland performance is much better.