alt Hacker NewsYou can minimize tearing with double buffering so it's pretty rare but you can't completely eliminate it. Xorg by design cannot guarantee perfect frames. Tearing is something you'll notice every time it happens, whereas latency is not something that's necessarily an issue, and modern compositors have substantially reduced this latency.
I'm not really sure why Wayland gets all the hate it does, you'd think desktop Linux was perfect before Wayland came along and made everything totally unusable. As for myself, it's been a much better experience than Xorg ever was, pretty much since day one -- I've never had a torn frame, I've never had any issues with input lag, and I've never had to fuss with video settings. Not once. I'm sure some people have, but across a dozen machines I've had exactly zero problems in...a few months shy of a decade.
Let's not forget Xorg's own devs have put it on life support and recommend Wayland, which was created by Xorg devs, going forward. Nobody wants to maintain 35-year old spaghetti code of a fundamentally flawed design.
Replies
> latency is not something that's necessarily an issue
Of course it is not. Especially when GUI elements are black, waiting for the next, or other, frame. (hello Microsoft).
Want to know how I know you've never once even looked at the X11 source code before pronouncing it "spaghetti code"?
Just repeat what you're told. It's what everyone else does.
I watch videos all the time on X11. With double buffering enabled, there is no screen tearing. It's fine. I have a 12 year old video card. Not exactly new tech.
You've replaced one "fundamentally flawed design" with another one, in the name of addressing petty, exaggerated concerns. This happens all the time these days. Nobody questions anything because most of you have fundamentally lost the ability to actually think. Repeating pre-packaged slogans, taglines, and catch phrases is about all anyone can do anymore.
I've heard all the nonsensical arguments in "favor" of Wayland and I see through all of them, exactly as I saw through systemd, pulseaudio, and all the other garbage that keeps getting shoved down everyone's throat. I'm not the only one. We're not using any of this shit.
We are computer programmers. We can maintain it and keep it going our damn selves. Really, there's not much work needed. X11 just keeps going, and going, and going, like the Energizer bunny. Maybe one day Wayland will have remote desktop support. lol