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.
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.