Wayland does address basically all of the tearing problems assuming a correct GPU driver (all of the opensource ones). There are several different problems, all of which are solved:

- Clients only provide complete buffer updates rather than drawing on to the front buffer, fixing tearing for all non-OpenGL apps

- Each monitor can have its own set of buffers and sync signal (technically the wayland protocol doesn't specify this, but makes it possible, and Weston does it correctly)

Anecdotal, but these "compositor problems" are not inherent to Linux or X11. I am extremely sensitive to things like tearing, and I can tell you it simply doesn't occur on my linux machines (though it does require enabling a TearFree X11 option on my intel GPU).

Wayland, unfortunately, seems to be the type of project that has been a year or two away from usability since its first release in 2012. I suspect we'll be stuck with X11 for a while yet.

The open source Radeon driver also does a good job of avoiding tearing. I think there are some pathological cases where it can still occur, but it is pretty rare. Catalyst was terrible at avoiding tearing the last time I used it (getting on to be 3 years ago now). I haven't looked into it, but it is possible that the tearing issue may not be solvable without a KMS driver (i.e. no binary blob drivers can do it).

I used Wayland/Weston for a full work day about a year ago to try it out. It really was very nearly ready. I can't quite remember what problems I ran into, but I could do my work (as a web developer) with very few real problems. Probably it's time to look at it again.

Interesting to hear, I might give it a shot too now.