So, I’m hoping to reduce the substantial screen tearing that I’m encountering while watching videos.

One of the suggestions that I have found is to enable wayland, which did help quite a bit (this is the guide I found). However, I’ve decided I don’t really want to use gnome. Gnome seems great, but I’ve already become accustomed to using cosmic.

Apparently pop os is in a transitionary phase and will eventually update to wayland as the default, but I’m just wondering if there’s other desktop environments I should be considering? I see that Fedora now comes with a KDE cosmic variant, but I don’t know if this would be any better or not.

Edit:

I ended up installing kde plasma standard desktop environment (which was listed here). Upon booting into the login screen there’s a big on-screen keyboard. Hit enter to bypass it. In the dropdown menu on the top left of the screen, there is an option for ‘pop on wayland’

So far, everything seems to be working good. I had to change the steam client to the ‘proton hotfix’ to get one of my games to play.

  • twinnie@feddit.uk
    3·
    2 days ago

    I did this a couple of months ago but I’ve since changed OS. I think the following worked:

    sudo nano /etc/gdm3/custom.conf

    Use the arrow keys to move the cursor and find the bit that says:

    WaylandEnable=false

    and change it to:

    WaylandEnable=true

    • circuitfarmer@lemmy.sdf.org
      2·
      2 days ago

      I’ve also done this.

      I am no longer using Cosmic – while I really liked it, it is still in alpha, and day-to-day was a bit janky in its current state. I am absolutely going to return to it once it matures.

      I didn’t switch OS; simply went back to pop shell / gnome (session title: “Pop on Wayland”).

      • technomad@slrpnk.netOPEnglish
        1·
        1 day ago

        Hey, I ended up going a different route. I’ll keep this option in mind if I need to try it later, and thanks for the help.

    • technomad@slrpnk.netOPEnglish
      1·
      2 days ago

      Thank you, I’ll give that a try and get back to you.

      Could I ask what you changed to and how come?

      • twinnie@feddit.uk
        1·
        2 days ago

        I’ve tried a few since switching from Windows. I’ve tried Fedora, Pop, EndeavourOS and openSUSE. I went back to openSUSE. I don’t know why but it just sat best with me. Fedora’s good as well but the openSUSE package manager is faster.

        Honestly I think the Desktop Environment is probably more important than the distro itself. I do like GNOME because it’s slick but I prefer the layout of Plasma, even though it feels dated. There’s Budgie as well but it doesn’t feel feature-complete.

      • moody@lemmings.world
        1·
        2 days ago

        If you’re logged in by default on startup, you will need to log out and select Wayland before logging in again. It won’t switch you to Wayland automatically, but it will remember your last selection so you only need to choose it once.

  • talEnglish
    1·
    2 days ago

    What software are you using to watch videos?

      • talEnglish
        1·
        2 days ago

        I don’t use Freetube, but I’m pretty sure that the Steam client can do vsync as long as you have hardware acceleration enabled in the Steam settings.

        Hmm.

        What video hardware are you using? Like, what’s the output of this command:

        $ glxinfo|grep "^OpenGL renderer string"

        Do you perchance have mpv? That gives very considerable control over video output, so it’s useful to try things regarding video.

        Can you yt-dlp this vsync test video to your local machine? I’ve used it in the past to confirm whether tearing is present, and it’d be useful to run under mpv with some different settings.

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hIRq5HTh5s

        • technomad@slrpnk.netOPEnglish
          1·
          1 day ago

          I think I’ve found a decent solution for now, I’ll keep the troubleshooting options you’ve listed in mind if I run into problems in the future. Thank you.