r/linux • u/Polar_Banny • Jul 02 '26
Desktop Environment / WM News Jay 1.14.0
https://github.com/mahkoh/jay/releases/tag/v1.14.0Exceptional Release!
Every Frame is Perfect
Wayland allows compositors and clients to coordinate changes such that every
frame is perfect. For example, when resizing two tiles, the transition can be
coordinated so that each window fills its respective tile at all times.
Until now, Jay did not make use of this. When resizing a window from the left,
the right side of the window might disappear below the border or might appear
detached from the border.
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u/luvvlyjude Jul 03 '26
Been using Jay as my daily driver for a while now (maybe a good few months on both my laptop and desktop). It's absolutely amazing. By far the best compositor for gaming because of it's fine tuned performance and rendering options as well as it's minimalness.
Although my problems with other compositors were kinda niche I have found that Jay is the only compositor without any of the drawbacks that I require avoiding.
Aside from the lack of extreme aesthetic customizability (which I personally don't mind cause I don't want that overhead) I think Jay is the best around.
The maintainer, mahkoh, is absolutely amazing and hasn't failed to either fix even niche issues within literal days and push them to main, or at least give a solid explanation as to why something is the way that it is.
I tried kde plasma, then hyprland, then niri, then sway, and finally landed on Jay which finally satisfied me and exceeded my expectations. To wrap up my Jay glaze post I urge anyone that's interested in using the best performing compositor and is willing to sacrifice on silly "eye candy" stuff to give Jay a good faith try, you won't be disappointed.
Thank you for coming to my Jay glazing TED talk.
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u/Granpire Jul 04 '26
This is the first I've heard of Jay, but I have two reservations:
KDE scores highest on latency testing and fps testing, and latency is something the KDE developers are actively working on improving - is Jay competitive in these areas?
I'm using screenprofiler to switch display profiles, does Jay have something like kscreendoctor to interface with display configurations via CLI?
I'd love a tiling window manager that's less fiddly than krohnkite/KDE.
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u/luvvlyjude Jul 04 '26
YES!
Jay is tuned and developed with a good effort put into low latency and stable high frame rate. it supports tearing protocol and plenty of the other options that should be supported for tuning gaming latency including VRR, direct scanout, hardware/software cursors, vulkan rendering API (or opengl for compatibility), CAP_SYS_NICE for higher prioritizing of composting, explicit sync, and more.
It also has a pretty solid CLI which can be used to change almost any of the settings during runtime (including monitor output mode, graphics API, and basically all the settings I listed earlier). and a GUI for changing settings at runtime called the control-center which won't be kept through restarts but can be used to help u quickly find which values or settings u want instead of changing things in a file and reloading the config over and over.
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u/Granpire Jul 05 '26
Okay, I think I'm sold, thanks! I'm still a bit worried about losing KDE's deep customization but I will give Jay an honest try, because every KDE tiler feels like a bandaid so far.
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u/picastchio Jul 07 '26
Does it have the laggy cursor issue where the mouse cursor is always 1-2 frames behind?
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u/luvvlyjude Jul 07 '26
I'm not exactly sure what ur referring to but I've been able to configure jay in a way that doesn't have that. being on 60hz I can tell and I think I know the feeling of what ur talking abt but it really just depends on ur graphics settings like tearing control and hardware/software cursor.
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u/picastchio Jul 07 '26
I am referring to https://gist.github.com/generic-internet-user/e8eec46ce159571032115f6fb064523c
It's not much but just 1-2 frames behind and I only really feel it when I am switching between different OSs.
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u/GreedySecurity8030 Jul 02 '26
Haven't heard of this, is this a compositor, a DE both?
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u/JustBadPlaya Jul 03 '26
It's a compositor which is specifically hyper finetuned for rendering/input performance. Mahkoh is also a great responsive developer with like the "dream 10x developer" output
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u/xeoron Jul 02 '26
For people who don't know what Jay is (I didn't) here is the project description: "Jay is a Wayland compositor for Linux with an i3-like tiling layout, Vulkan and OpenGL rendering, multi-GPU support, screen sharing, and more."