You can minimize tearing with double buffering so it's pretty rare but you can't completely eliminate it. Xorg by design cannot guarantee perfect frames. Tearin

You can minimize tearing with double buffering so it's pretty rare but you can't completely eliminate it. Xorg by design cannot guarantee perfect frames. Tearing is something you'll notice every time it happens, whereas latency is not something that's necessarily an issue, and modern compositors have substantially reduced this latency. I'm not really sure why Wayland gets all the hate it does, you'd think desktop Linux was perfect before Wayland came along and made everything totally unusable. As for myself, it's been a much better experience than Xorg ever was, pretty much since day one -- I've never had a torn frame, I've never had any issues with input lag, and I've never had to fuss with video settings. Not once. I'm sure some people have, but across a dozen machines I've had exactly zero problems in...a few months shy of a decade. Let's not forget Xorg's own devs have put it on life support and recommend Wayland, which was created by Xorg devs, going forward. Nobody wants to maintain 35-year old spaghetti code of a fundamentally flawed design.