Yesterday, I decided to try XFCE desktop environment and boy, it's really faster than the GNOME desktop environment.
As soon as I started to play around with it, I noticed a good amount of screen tearing and to my surprise, I came to know that the XFCE environment is known to have such issues.
After a few minutes of research, I was able to fix it. Here are the steps:
Note: This is done on Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic Beaver
If you dont have the package inxi
installed in your system, do it right now:
sudo apt install inxi
After you're done installing, type the following command to find out which graphics you're using:
inxi -G
If you're using an Intel Graphics Driver, you'll probably get something like this:
Graphics: Card: Intel Device 5926
Display Server: x11 (X.Org 1.19.6 ) driver: i915 Resolution: 1920x1080@60.00hz
OpenGL: renderer: Mesa DRI Intel Iris Plus Graphics 640 (Kaby Lake GT3e) (KBL GT3)
version: 4.6 Mesa 20.0.8
You can try go to Settings Manager->Window Manager Tweaks->Compositor" and enable **Synchronize drawing to the vertical blank. From what I've read, if you do that, it should stop but it didn't do anything for me.
If the above technique didn't work, go to /usr/shar/X11/xorg.conf.d/
and create a file for your graphics card named 10-intel.conf
.
Copy-paste the following configuration into the file:
Section "Device"
Identifier "Intel Graphics"
Driver "intel"
Option "TearFree" "true"
EndSection
Save the file, reboot your system and look for any screen tearing issues. If you didn't face any, that means it worked! 😁