> there was a time when watching certain videos with certain media players on Linux was incredibly painful because of how blatant and obtrusive the tearing was

> there was a time when watching certain videos with certain media players on Linux was incredibly painful because of how blatant and obtrusive the tearing was It was because of the crap LCD monitors (5 to 20 ms GtG) and how they are driven. The problem persists today. The (Wayland) solution was to render and display a complete frame at a time without taking into account the timings involved in hardware (you always have a good static image, but you have to wait). I tried Tails (comes with some Wayland compositor) on a laptop. The GUI performance was terrible with only a Tor browser open and one tab. If you do not care about hardware, you will, sooner or later, run into problems. Not everybody has your shiny 240 Hz monitor.