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Comment by idle_zealot | Hacker News Reader

If the Linux desktop consolidates/unifies around one option I’d probably stop using it. The primary reason I use Linux on my desktop is so that I can use my niche window manager of choice as a first-class citizen, rather than hacking reasonable window management into the system with scripts on top of a bad-by-default window manager. If I can’t do that anymore I might as well use macOS with yabai and get the broader application support.

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I agree that the customization is a huge draw for me.

But... I also want things like hibernate to just work, screen tearing to not happen on X11, etc etc.

The polish is absolutely not there, and I agree w/ the article that's a result of the fragmented ecosystem. If the Linux community could agree to invest in the underlying APIs for desktop stuff, it seems we'd be in a much better place and still have lots of customization options on top.

Of course, I understand that's a huge coordination challenge.

Hibernate is all in the kernel. You trigger it by writing to a file in /sys. Your DE choice has nothing to do with this.

Most things on Linux are actually like this, where everything is in the kernel or some other small project and the DE just adds a wrapper GUI (or sometimes a management deamon) and really has absolutely nothing to do with how the thing works.

And thank goodness for that because all of the popular DEs use terrible window managers. I wouldn't bother with X11 if those were the only functional choices.

Also some people (like me) really don't mind tearing but can't stand an extra frame of latency when we're typing. It's nice to have options since no one agrees on everything.

Yeah, I'm aware it's in the kernel, but it's only useful for PCs. So effectively it's a "desktop" problem in terms of people deciding to dedicate resources to it. And... hence why it breaks all the damn time.

I can't understand what on earth your comment is supposed to mean. Are you saying most people working on the kernel don't expect it to run on PCs? And so there are no resources dedicated to the suspend states? Also of all the different suspend states suspend to disk definitely breaks the least. Most importantly I really can't understand why you think any of this has to do with desktop environments.

Well it's not _that_ confusing of a comment...

My point is suspend states aren't important to big commercial users who are running linux servers. They have no reason to contribute to making it work well. Hence, it likely doesn't get much attention compared to many other parts of the kernel.

It doesn't have to do with "Desktop environments", but it very much is part of the "linux desktop" experience.

> [I want] screen tearing to not happen on X11...

If you have AMD hardware that uses the 'amdgpu' driver, then -IME- enabling the TearFree option seems to completely eliminate tearing. (Though, I am using KDE, which _also_ has a "Make the compositor use vsync" option... which didn't actually eliminate tearing, when used by itself. But, there _may_ be confounders.)

Anyway. Drop this into a file named "$WHATEVER.conf" in '/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d' (or into your xorg.conf), and you should be good to go:

  Section "Device"
    Identifier "AMD"
    Driver "amdgpu"
    Option "TearFree" "on"
  EndSection

Alternatively, you could enable the setting with the 'xrandr' tool:

  xrandr --output $OUTPUT_NAME --set TearFree on

but that only sticks for as long as the affected X server stays up.

What a great example. This stuff should be fixed by default.

FWIW, I assume it adds a (maybe one frame) delay. It _is_ on by default when you've rotated or transformed the output (and for "secondary outputs".... whatever a "secondary" output is). From 'amdgpu(4)`:

       Option "TearFree" "boolean"
              Set the default value of  the  per-output  'TearFree'  property,
              which  controls tearing prevention using the hardware page flip‐
              ping mechanism. TearFree is on for any CRTC associated with  one
              or  more  outputs with TearFree on. Two separate scanout buffers
              need to be allocated for each CRTC with TearFree on. If this op‐
              tion  is set, the default value of the property is 'on' or 'off'
              accordingly. If this option isn't set, the default value of  the
              property  is  auto,  which means that TearFree is on for rotated
              outputs, outputs with RandR transforms applied and for RandR 1.4
              secondary outputs, otherwise off.

Edit: Also, distro packagers are quite able to set this on-by-default. It is configurable, after all. If you don't like the default that your distro has chosen, go chat at em. :)

The default is supposed to be Wayland, since Xorg is no longer being actively developed. Though it's taking some distros a while to move to it as default.

I've no idea why so many people expect completely different Unix-clones with completely different origins that simply share one component between them, which they also all heavily modify, to somehow give up their own identity and merge.

It's probably simply because others all call them “Linux”, but they rarely even call themselves that. One cannot easily find the word “Linux” on the websites of “Fedora” or “Ubuntu” for instance and they simply call themselves that.

Monopolistic desire is a mind virus that people steeped in corporate culture acquire and bring with them into scenes like this. To a mind so afflicted, the premise that 'Linux' should be unified to maximize the chance of achieving total market domination seems to go unquestioned.

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