I had the same complaints wrt video tearing, however in very recent distros (F21+) the issue has largely been resolved. In non-composited environments, tearing

I had the same complaints wrt video tearing, however in very recent distros (F21+) the issue has largely been resolved. In non-composited environments, tearing would happen unless a hardware overlay used. In composited environments, tearing would be inevitable because the compositor would use a nonsynchronized back-to-front-buffer copy. This has largely been replaced with a synchronized buffer flip, so that there is no tearing at all. The one remaining issue I have is with fullscreen Firefox videos. These get "direct" output (they skip the compositor) but don't use a hardware overlay, and therefore tear. There are a couple solutions for this that I'm playing with.