Mikeserv Support Forum

I've found myself wanting to use a compositor for desktop use now. I hate to do it, but ever since I changed the BIOS to enable UEFI and Resizable BAR, I've been having things like jerky window dragging (especially over top of the composited Firefox window... it's a compositor itself), jerky side scrolling in my text editor (I use something called Adie, part of the FOX gui toolkit, for decades... used to be called TextEdit in the XWincommander days. I'm just used to it) AND strange behaviour in my urxvt terminal. For example if I type a command that launches an ncurses interface (e.g. make menuconfig), the terminal goes half black until I move my mouse. These things occurred at 60 Hz and 165 Hz.

Anyway, I knew this was the problem (a sync issue) and I noticed it pretty much immediately after. I'm not sure why (It wouldn't be that it's "too fast" now simply by enabling more direct VRAM access lol). I didn't want to, but I knew turning on XFCE's compositor would fix it.

For gaming I'll be switching to my IceWM and not using compositing, so that's good.

So, the moral of the story is, maybe compositors ARE necessary and more than just cosmetic behaviour.

Mate's compositor (Marco I think) works really well in that DE, prior to using Mate on some machines I had been disabling compositing everywhere for years, aside from occasionally testing Wayland where it can't be disabled. In Plasma it still significantly hurts stability, especially in Plasma 6, I've had better luck with it in XFCE in the past, I'll have to try it again in that DE, it's been many years.

It's enabled by default in XFCE, I had disabled it. It's a real compositor now I think, in my old XFCE 4.12.0 (on my LFS) I think it's just software rendering for some transparency effects and menu animations etc.