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Comment by hansel_der | Hacker News Reader

> can not drive 4K and 2K external monitors via thunderbolt adapter.

VGA ftw

> screen tearing sucks

it sure does. look into your os config for a compositor or drop the following into /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-intel.conf :

  Section "Device"
   Identifier "Intel Graphics"
   Driver     "intel"
   Option     "AccelMethod" "sna"
   Option     "TearFree"    "true"
  EndSection

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However, TearFree does murder performance and lead to some horrible screen lag at times, and as an extra bonus AccelMethod sna is still crashy years after being introduced :(

edit: there's also the modesetting driver + a reasonable compositor, but this can come with it's own set of bugs and issues in my experience.

I've been interested in recording music using free software on Linux. The exchange above is similar to the cycle I've been in... encountering problems, finding magical incantations that fix things in some ways but often involve some sort of tradeoff, and making gradual progress toward being as productive as I am using Apple's Logic.

But I've been doing this three steps forward, two steps back routine for like three years now. I have most things working but it has really taken the full force of my frustration with Apple to keep returning to it and making progress.

It's exactly why I have mac laptops for work and personal use, although I also have a full time linux desktop (and also a windows one for gaming. still no real alternative there!).

I'm an easily frustrated person and I end up with enough pain points on linux for both work and personal use that I've never managed to make the switch full time.

Why does it have a ‘tearfree’ ‘false’ option?

From the man page

> Thus enabling TearFree requires more memory and is slower (reduced throughput) and introduces a small amount of output latency, but it should not impact input latency

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