> Tearing in full screen (video) playback was not an issue for decades

Either you're being hyperbolic about the length of time or this is simply untrue.

I have been using Wayland full time for 3 years, and 3 years ago the main driver of me switching was screen tearing.

I was heavily invested in the X11 ecosystem with highly customised fontconfig's, so this was quite painful for me at the time and I definitely tried to solve the screen tearing issue. Part of it was that Linux did not have hardware acceleration in browsers, which is where I spent most of my time (especially for video playback, such as YouTube).

So those extensions didn't help, and when you get used to the buttery smooth scrolling experience of MacOS and iOS it feels quite janky going back to linux- especially when you've invested so much into making it a more beautiful experience for yourself.

> Either you're being hyperbolic about the length of time or this is simply untrue.

I am not hyperbolic, X11 has this Xv API, video players generally use it since early 2000s (as that was only reasonable way to even scale video to fullscreen with contemporary computers). Browsers - well, that is a different issue. I do not think Firefox uses it and have no idea about Chromium.

> Part of it was that Linux did not have hardware acceleration in browsers, which is where I spent most of my time (especially for video playback, such as YouTube).

Linux also have hardware decoding acceleration API (even multiple ones - historic XvMC, NVidia-specific VDPAU and current mainstream VA-API), their support in software is more spotty than basic Xv API (AFAIK MPlayer implemented VDPAU but not VA-API, MPV required for some time explicit option to use VA-API and i have no idea about VLC). Firefox got support just recently: https://ubuntuhandbook.org/index.php/2021/08/enable-hardware...

I would generally suggest to view web video such as YouTube in MPV video player using its youtube-dl integration. It is much better experience than playing video in Firefox.

> I would generally suggest to view web video such as YouTube

I’m talking about more than video though. I’m talking about scrolling text. You can see visible lines when you have a large display and scroll a page.

Anyway. It doesn’t matter. You want to run X11 then that’s fine, but I’m quite happy with wayland and I’m happy to leave the weird configuration and cacophony of hacks behind.

Nobody here is trying to take your experience away from you, if Wayland makes you happy then by all means, keep using it. Without users on the cutting edge, it's hard to debug new software. However, what others have been saying here, is that x11 typically doesn't have screen tearing issues on the majority of hardware/software configurations. Yes, it is possible to remove a composition pipeline and disable all of the safeguards put in place to eliminate screen-tearing. If you're using a barebones system like i3wm or similarly stark systems, you will probably notice tearing; however, the vast majority of hardware/software combos that people actually use these days do not exhibit this issue. On my Nvidia and Intel machines, I do not notice any tearing on fresh installs without configuration. This goes for gaming, video watching, 3D modelling, reading, website scrolling and quite literally everything else I do on my desktop and laptop.

Wtf is the point in buttery smooth scrolling in Mac if you have motion blur. Literally placebo.