Every recent time I would daily drive Linux (Ubuntu and Antix) I had screen tearing out of the box. Not really an acceptable feature.

3 year old Lenovo laptop with Intel Integrated plus Nvidia dedicated on Ubuntu connected to external HDMI and Displayport standard 1080p monitors and built in laptop monitor, and an old PC with old dedicated Nvidia on AntiX(Debian) connected to old 17" VGA LCD monitor. Nothing fancy. Screen tearing on all of them.

Anyway, the out of the box experience is shit on this front. Screen tearing shouldn't be a thing anymore. It's not like those GPUs were some exotic prototype HW nobody else has to need hours of reding forums and tinkering with .conf files to get rid fo screen tearing.

2) If I were using a batteries-included distro,

  Section "Device"
    Identifier "AMD"
    Driver "amdgpu"
    Option "TearFree" "on"
    Option "VariableRefresh" "on"
  EndSection

> Option "TearFree" "on"

reminds me of a pdf viewer at some point had an option to "respect permission" or something, you could turn it off and ignore the limits on the pdf that the author set.

Oh yeah, I always say "Don't respect" on PDF readers that have that setting. It's a very nice setting.

In regards to "TearFree" not being on by default, I expect that there's a good reason for it... maybe it adds some amount of latency (whether on hardware I don't have, or so little latency that I don't notice it), or maybe it just flat-out doesn't work right on some hardware that I happen to not have.

Regardless, deciding whether or not to set those settings is the job of one's distro.