Posted November 21st 2016
I've used pretty much the same X setup since 1993. I'm happy with it. I want minimal window decorations, no click to focus and alt+tab to get me a new xterm and three virtual desktops. I don't want menus, status bars, clocks, animated window movement or anything like that.
But... one thing was annoying me. When scrolling some sites, such as stack overflow, the browser window gets a diagonal tear in it. It's easiest to see in video, wikipedia has a reasonable article with pictures. Fixing this should be easy: redraw the screen during the vertical blanking interval. That's not a new idea, even the Commodore 64 had an interrupt you could trigger when a particular scanline was passed.
The fix I ended up using was to create /etc/X11/xorg.conf with the TearFree option set:
# 2016-11-21 Debian default Xorg install doesn't have this file. # MML added it to get the TearFree option. Section "Device" Identifier "Intel inbuilt graphics" Driver "intel" Option "TearFree" "true" EndSection
Fixes the problem completely. But... before I did that, I also tried a few other fixes.
First, I tried switching to 'Wayland'. Wayland is a replacement for X. I've been meaning to take a look at it for a while. It's in Debian testing, so all I did is install 'weston', shut down X and start 'weston-launch'. That works fine in the sense that it gets me a display and I can start a terminal in it. But nothing else works. No emacs outside the terminal, no firefox, no mplayer. I could probably get some or all of those to work with some more fiddling, but I'm not that interested. I'll probably take another look at Wayland in a year.
Next, I tried running 'compton', which basically does the same thing as the TearFree option in the X server, but at a higher level. Compton changed the colour of my root window, but didn't fix the tearing. I tried the --dbe option and each of the five --vsync options. Didn't work. It also seemed to freeze up twice, getting my machine back required 'kill -9' from a console, so I gave on on 'compton' fairly quickly.
Finally, I tried the 'xfce4' window manager. It has a non-default option to do compositing, which is again basically the same thing as the TearFree option in the X server. It's in Manager/window manager tweaks/compositor/ Works fine, but I didn't really want to switch window managers. I'm perfectly happy with openbox.