Graphical Issues in Linux

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I want this to be a discussion of something that seems to be known but rarely if ever discussed, as well as possibly hearing if there is any other option or if I'm just out of luck.

 

Basically, X is terrible.  They've done what they can over the years but it's really old and it shows.  No matter what, I get tearing and/or stutter when trying to do anything at 60 fps that should be vsynced, and I'm not alone.  Others have reported this on other forums and the answer has always been that X just can't do vsync properly and this is the result.

 

Wayland is promising imo, but I tried it with Fedora 26 (using Gnome 3.*) and I experienced this weird cursor lag issue, and upon some digging, I discovered this is apparently an issue with a combination of the desktop environment and wayland.  Rather than treating the cursor as a special thing so that it always works, they've thrown the tracking and rendering of it in with everything else on screen so it can get bogged down by other animations, even very simple ones.

 

What are my options?  Try a distro that uses Wayland with a different DE?  I don't think XFCE supports it and I don't care for KDE tbh...

And what's been your experience?  Have you noticed these same issues?  What do you think will be done about it?

[SCHISCHKA]

i have no issues using ubuntu.

One thing I can think of is the newest xserver will not play well with proprietary graphics drivers. You will see this on Fedora and Arch. The proprietary drivers lag behind in development, being closed source they play catch up. 

[SCHISCHKA]

18 minutes ago, Name Taken said:

You must be referring to AMDGPU-PRO because the proprietary Nvidia driver is way ahead of Nouveau in performance and functionality.

I did not mean performance. Im talking about bugs and compatibility. On arch you can do an update but watch if xerver has an update but nvidia does not.

Nividia's proprietary may be ahead of the open source driver but it does lag in changes to Xserver. Being closed source the developers do not talk to each other.

[noahdvs]

I was going to suggest KDE since it runs pretty smooth for me, but since it's not for you... maybe try Budgie? I think Budgie currently uses Mutter, which is what GNOME 3 uses, so maybe you should wait until Budgie switches over to Qt. Also, I don't think you should write off Xfce so quickly. GNOME 3 is one of the heavies DEs out there right now, so maybe picking a lighter DE would help? You can even use KWin with it to get the smooth animations KDE has: http://www.thelinuxrain.com/articles/tutorial-how-to-use-kwin-window-manager-with-xfce

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10 hours ago, noahdvs said:

I was going to suggest KDE since it runs pretty smooth for me, but since it's not for you... maybe try Budgie? I think Budgie currently uses Mutter, which is what GNOME 3 uses, so maybe you should wait until Budgie switches over to Qt. Also, I don't think you should write off Xfce so quickly. GNOME 3 is one of the heavies DEs out there right now, so maybe picking a lighter DE would help? You can even use KWin with it to get the smooth animations KDE has: http://www.thelinuxrain.com/articles/tutorial-how-to-use-kwin-window-manager-with-xfce

I don't mind XFCE, in fact in a lot of ways I like it, but there's two issues:

• On X, I get the issues I described, and afaik it's not compatible with wayland (yet)
• it's a little "basic", like, in other DEs things like media keys work globally because all media players go through the same "system" (sorry I can't describe it better) but xfce doesn't seem to have anything like this.  that's just one example

[noahdvs]

1 hour ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

I don't mind XFCE, in fact in a lot of ways I like it, but there's two issues:

• On X, I get the issues I described, and afaik it's not compatible with wayland (yet)
• it's a little "basic", like, in other DEs things like media keys work globally because all media players go through the same "system" (sorry I can't describe it better) but xfce doesn't seem to have anything like this.  that's just one example

Not working with Wayland isn't necessarily a problem. GNOME is known to have some performance issues and KWin is pretty smooth. I agree that Xfce is a little basic, but at least it's stable and light. I don't think you have many options, so Xfce+KWin is worth a try. What's the reason you don't like KDE?

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19 minutes ago, noahdvs said:

Not working with Wayland isn't necessarily a problem. GNOME is known to have some performance issues and KWin is pretty smooth. I agree that Xfce is a little basic, but at least it's stable and light. I don't think you have many options, so Xfce+KWin is worth a try. What's the reason you don't like KDE?

I've found it to be a little unstable and other minor things, like there doesn't seem to be a way to properly disable mouse acceleration, it doesn't detect my UPS the way any other DE seems to, and something about the interface has always just made me feel a little "unsettled". I know sounds silly but that's the feeling I get with it.

[noahdvs]

15 minutes ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

I've found it to be a little unstable and other minor things, like there doesn't seem to be a way to properly disable mouse acceleration, it doesn't detect my UPS the way any other DE seems to, and something about the interface has always just made me feel a little "unsettled". I know sounds silly but that's the feeling I get with it.

If you want stability, KDE now has LTS versions of Plasma (currently 5.8 LTS).

Unless I'm missing something, you just turn Pointer acceleration down to 1.0 x under System Settings->Input Devices->Mouse->Advanced.

What is a UPS?

I kind of do and don't know what you mean when you say the interface is unsettling. My first thought is it's because KDE Plasma is different, which is a valid reason not to like it. The titlebars are also a massive waste of space. GNOME is worse for applications with no client side decorations, but I'll admit that the GNOME apps that do have CSDs look pretty slick, if basic.

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Just now, noahdvs said:

If you want stability, KDE now has LTS versions of Plasma (currently 5.8 LTS).

Unless I'm missing something, you just turn Pointer acceleration down to 1.0 x under System Settings->Input Devices->Mouse->Advanced.

It never quite felt right, idk 

Just now, noahdvs said:

What is a UPS?

like a battery for a desktop PC

 

[noahdvs]

10 minutes ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

It never quite felt right, idk 

like a battery for a desktop PC

 

Well, if you don't want KDE or Xfce, there's also MATE, which can also use KWin if MATE's window manager isn't smooth enough. KWin might even work on GNOME, but I don't know. I don't see why it wouldn't work.

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3 minutes ago, noahdvs said:

Well, if you don't want KDE or Xfce, there's also MATE, which can also use KWin if MATE's window manager isn't smooth enough. KWin might even work on GNOME, but I don't know. I don't see why it wouldn't work.

I just don't understand why any of them should have any issues.  Even going back to ~2006 - 2008, Linux has always had huge performance issues in the graphical department.  For example, in Windows XP, resizing a window rapidly was no big deal and it kept up, but in Linux, any DE that used a compositor (and yes that's a fair comparison since XP had a basic one that would allow a transparent window to show what was truly behind it not just straight through to the desktop) was painfully slow, and even moving to Windows Vista and 7, the performance for them remained while Linux couldn't do it.  Thank god we've come a long way since then, but why must there be these issues?

[noahdvs]

20 minutes ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

I just don't understand why any of them should have any issues.  Even going back to ~2006 - 2008, Linux has always had huge performance issues in the graphical department.  For example, in Windows XP, resizing a window rapidly was no big deal and it kept up, but in Linux, any DE that used a compositor (and yes that's a fair comparison since XP had a basic one that would allow a transparent window to show what was truly behind it not just straight through to the desktop) was painfully slow, and even moving to Windows Vista and 7, the performance for them remained while Linux couldn't do it.  Thank god we've come a long way since then, but why must there be these issues?

Keep in mind that not everyone has these issues. KDE Plasma is pretty smooth on my laptop. Also, using the open source graphics drivers tends to minimize issues, though you don't really have much of a choice if you do anything with 3D graphics and you have an Nvidia card. Nvidia forces the people developing the open source Nvidia driver to reverse engineer things so performance sucks if you don't use the proprietary driver.

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Just now, noahdvs said:

Keep in mind that not everyone has these issues. KDE Plasma is pretty smooth on my laptop. Also, using the open source graphics drivers tends to minimize issues, though you don't really have much of a choice if you do anything with 3D graphics and you have an Nvidia card. Nvidia forces the people developing the open source Nvidia driver to reverse engineer things so performance sucks if you don't use the proprietary driver.

I have an AMD card which I remember back in the day was the worse option for Linux but I guess things have changed since then

[noahdvs]

4 minutes ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

I have an AMD card which I remember back in the day was the worse option for Linux but I guess things have changed since then

Historically, Nvidia was better for 3D graphics and if you're using the high end cards, it still is to an extent. However, AMD has caught up since they began contributing to the open source driver. If you just want your DE to work smoothly, you're probably better off using Intel first (has the most development behind it), then AMD. AMD should work especially well if you're on a rolling release distro like Arch or openSUSE Tumbleweed.