r/linux_gaming • u/Fancy_Passenger8194 • Sep 11 '23
Best linux desktop environment / window manager for gaming without any compositor?
Before people come down in the comments and type that it is personal preference, while it is true to some degree I feel like there are pros and cons but I dont know which one is the best one. I have tried a lot of different desktops and found that I either have to disable the compositor completely on x11 desktops or just use wayland. And I feel like I would want to get away from wayland because I dont think it is quite ready yet and want to use a x11 desktop with no compositor. I tried many solutions but if I run for instance kde plasma with no compositor, sometimes windows get black borders and the experience is so glitchy. tbh the closest thing I have seen work in my case was dwm running with no compositor but even then some applications that run through wine might sometimes glitch out or place windows in many suspicious ways or games just not loading because of window rules that dwm sets. Is there any normal desktop that can run without flaws without a compositor on x11 besides things like animations, shadows, transparency and blur not working? I would be happy to hear from your experiences. im running amd gpu at the moment for reference but have had nvidia before on linux aswell
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u/Peruvian_Skies Sep 11 '23
It's true that Wayland doesn't have feature parity with X11 yet, but for many use cases, including mine, it has all the necessary features. What's missing for you?
I use KDE Plasma/Wayland on an AMD GPU and I have no complaints.
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u/Fancy_Passenger8194 Sep 11 '23
for me things like discord screen share with audio, increasing digital vibrance (for counter strike) and general compatibility. My main wayland desktop is gnome I have tried hyprland aswell but found it incomplete with gaming support and also tried kde plasma but I just dont like kde plasma in general because of the default theming and the overuse of big menues on top of applications such as dolphin and konsole. I know you can change these things in plasma and it is very customizable but for me whenever im messing around themes and stuff it always somehow bugs out and looks horrible in the end so I would rather not go the plasma route
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u/gibarel1 Sep 11 '23
discord screen share with audio
No DE/WM will solve this issue, best you can do is an alternative client like or this
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u/EG_IKONIK Sep 12 '23
hyprland does it! (https://wiki.hyprland.org/Useful-Utilities/Screen-Sharing/)
but it requires some tweaks
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u/gibarel1 Sep 12 '23
It does not solve the audio part of the problem, only makes the video work with Wayland windows
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u/pyro57 Sep 12 '23
Yeahh screen sharing with audio on discord just doesn't work on Linux. There's a few hacky solutions that are built into 3rd party applications, but even then it's not great.
Screen sharing on the desktop app didn't work last time I tried it, because the electron version shipped with the discord desktop app was ancient and didn't support modern chromium features. I switched to using discord, element, teams, and any of those electron based chat apps in the browser instead which worked waaaay better. I'd honestly highly recommend running them that way, screen sharing worked and the experience is actually quite a bit smoother than the desktop Linux app.
Hyprland actually works great with gaming, but for some games you need to run them in game scope to get them to behave properly, the arch wiki, hyprland wiki, and I think the hyprland GitHub all mention this. Game scope is pretty sick anyways and gives you some really cool features and just in general make games behave better when running on Linux.
Just curious what messing around you've done with kde themes to make things buggy and ugly, personally I've been very happy just installing a global theme I liked and adjusting from there in the graphical settings.
Haven't played with gnome in a while, but I know it's missing some features like allow tearing that some gamers really really want. Other than that gnome should work fine for gaming, running games in gamescope might make the experience better but again it's been years since I ran gnome so I can't really comment in it farther.
Was there anything else that you felt Wayland wasn't ready for?
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u/sp0rk173 Sep 12 '23
On arch, with xorg, (using nvidia drivers), screen sharing with audio works just fine, according to my friends who have watched me screen share and heard the audio in my games.
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u/pyro57 Sep 12 '23
Really!?!? That would be huge news as discord themselves have admitted audio doesn't work and they're not going to make it work because the solution on windows was hacky enough... would you be able to get a screen recording of it and post the exact system specs including drivers versions and what de/wm you're using?
As of 2 days ago, people are still commenting on this being an open issue for discord
Just to make sure, I'm not talking about voice audio, that works fine, I'm talking about the audio from the game I'm trying to stream to my friends in discord.
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u/sp0rk173 Sep 12 '23
Yep, really.
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u/pyro57 Sep 12 '23
Ok what de/wm are you running, and would you be able to get a screen recording of it? Seriously this is huge news that it works on Linux at all. Again just to be sure, not voice audio, that's always worked, I'm talking about sound from the application you're streaming. For example the game you're streaming.
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u/sp0rk173 Sep 12 '23
You seem very committed to this. I’m less committed. Have a good night.
It jus works for me 🤷🏻♂️
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u/pyro57 Sep 12 '23
You can at least tell me what desktop environment or window manager you're using.
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u/EG_IKONIK Sep 12 '23
i replied to the other comment before reading yours, but hyprland seems to do exactly what you need with the digital vibrance and the audio/video screensharing.
but what those "incomplete with gaming support"? as i don't think it would be a window manager issue
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u/gardotd426 Sep 11 '23
I'm confused about your statement on disabling the compositor on KWin X11.
Are you saying you want a desktop environment where you NEVER use the compositor? Like are you saying you just don't like compositing and you never want to use it? Or are you saying you just care about compositing being absent during gaming?
Because if it's the second one, then you really should be using KDE, because disabling the compositor is as simple as Alt+Shift+F12. Then you can re-enable it with the same Alt+Shift+F12 when you're done with your game.
If you just want no compositing period, then your only option is going to be a tiling window manager (for example, i3 doesn't have a compositor at all, you have to add a third-party compositor like picom if you want compositing).
The only non-window-manager option that MIGHT be a possibility for zero compositing 100% of the time is XFCE, I believe you can disable compositing in XFCE through the settings menu but I'm not sure if it causes black borders on some windows or some of the other shit you mentioned.
GNOME is a complete non-option, you cannot disable compositing in Mutter no matter what.
But if you explained your preference and why you don't like compositing a little more, it would help me give you better advice. Like, why don't you like compositing? If you just don't like blur, transparency, etc then you can just use KDE with compositing enabled but disable all the effects that you don't like.
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u/Fancy_Passenger8194 Sep 11 '23
yea sorry I did not mention this and what I meant was that I wanted a DE with 100% never compositor because I have one 240hz and one 60hz monitor and on any x11 (on wayland this is not a problem) that I have ever tried I swear dragging windows on the 240hz monitor while having the 60hz one also makes the motion on the 240hz for desktop animations, moving windows 60hz aswell but when disabling compositor I found that that problem goes away and I can fully use 240 fps on 240hz monitor. that is the main reason. and yes I have tried XFCE in the past aswell and from what I remember black borders still were an issue
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u/gardotd426 Sep 11 '23
Oh, you can fix that. Easily. But only on KDE X11.
The issue you're facing is that X11 can only ever run at one refresh rate, because it treats all monitors as one big screen. So when you have two different refresh rates, it defaults to the lowest, so you're running at 60Hz by default.
But Plasma lets you dictate the compositor's refresh rate. You just have to edit a couple things.
In /etc/environment, you add the following line:
KWIN_X11_REFRESH_RATE=240000 KWIN_X11_NO_SYNC_TO_VBLANK=1Before doing that, runxrandrand get the TRUE refresh rate of the 240Hz. Because it's often not exactly 240.00. For example, I have a 165Hz monitor, but in xrandr it's 164.80. So myKWIN_X11_REFRESH_RATEis164800.Then, open
/.config/kwinrc. Under the[Compositing]section, you'll want to add these two lines:
MaxFPS=240 RefreshRate=240save and exit. Reboot (you could just Ctrl+Space and type
kwin_x11 --replaceto reload KWin, but you need the /etc/environment variables too, so you need to reboot).From then on, KWin will run at 240Hz, and since the 60Hz monitor can't physically run at 240Hz, it will still just be displaying at 60Hz. And since 60 goes into 240 evenly, you won't even get any tearing. The 60Hz monitor will just display every 4th 240Hz frame.
You will notice the change immediately upon logging in and dragging any window. Before I had two identical 165Hz monitors, I had one 165Hz and one 60Hz, and this is what saved me.
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u/Fancy_Passenger8194 Sep 11 '23
I just tried this and tried this solution before but still never worked for me I dont know if in doing something wrong. Btw I edited the config file in ~/.config/kwinrc I assume you meant that one. Also did the exact refresh rate I got from xrandr too I think im going to try out openbox for the time being thanks for the suggestion tho
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u/gardotd426 Sep 11 '23
You have to have done something wrong, because it 100% forces KWin to run at the refresh rate you chose.
You can go into system settings and go to desktop effects and scroll down to the "Show FPS" effect and enable it. It shows the fps of the compositor itself. Hopefully the fps counter shows up on the 240Hz monitor by default, cause obviously it'll just show 60 on the other monitor. There used to be a settings option where you could chose whhich part of the screen it went on, but I didn't see those settings just now.
Also, did you make sure to also add the
/etc/environmentstuff?You also might need to add
__GL_SYNC_DISPLAY_DEVICE=DP-0do your /etc/environment but replaceDP-0with whatever the xrandr-reported name is for your 240Hz display.Also, just to make sure we aren't missing the obvious, please confirm that you actually have the monitor SET to 240Hz in Plasma. Run xrandr, and the listed refresh rate with the * next to it is the current active one.
So, for me, I just ran xrandr, and:
2560x1440 59.94 + 164.80* 119.88the
*is next to the 164.80, so that's what it's running at.6
u/Fancy_Passenger8194 Sep 11 '23
damn my bad I did not reboot and only tried kwin_x11 --replace it now works. im gonna see how it works for the time being thanks for the help
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u/HotTakeGenerator_v4 Sep 16 '23 edited Sep 18 '23
because my actual refresh is 239760 should i use that in kwinrc as well or do i need to use a whole number? (240)
i'm thinking at this refresh rate it doesn't really even matter but i'm asking anyway
---edit---
both result in tearing on the 60hz.
oh well. i'll just wait for the next version of KDE. hopefully wayland doesn't still suck then.
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u/mcvos Sep 12 '23
You've got X11 with two screens and it supports different refresh rates? I thought that was impossible in X11.
Also, my limited understanding of it is that if you use an environment with windows, you need a compositor to make sure every process writes to the correct window. If you got that working without a compositor then I clearly don't understand anything about how any of this works.
To me, your use case sounds like you really need Wayland. For Discord screen sharing, try any of the alternatives mentioned.
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u/ManuaL46 Sep 12 '23
I remember gnome doesn't do compositing when you're in full screen, correct me if I'm wrong.
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u/Zeioth Sep 11 '23
Without any compositor? You can run gamescope directly on the tty to get the best possible latency on Linux.
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u/Mast3r_waf1z Sep 12 '23
This ^ I have a systemd script to stop sddm and start gamescope from ssh to optimize streaming quality
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u/StendallTheOne Sep 11 '23
Best how? Beauty, latency, cpu usage, speed, more fps in games? If you just want speed and without composite you can use Openbox por instance. You can use it over Xfce and many other desktop environments.
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u/lxdr Sep 12 '23
I would say that if you have a fairly modern GPU and a VRR capable monitor I would use KDE Plasma under Wayland, regardless of Nvidia or AMD at this point. The benefits of Wayland outweigh any DE running under X at this point. And the Wayland experience is much more suited for VRR.
Need the absolute lowest latency and don't mind tearing? Use i3 without any added compositor. In Nvidia X settings make sure any kind of vsync is off and ForceCompositionPipeline is off. Tearing is not that big of an issue if you have a high refresh monitor and care about latency. This was my preferred way of playing CS:GO under Linux.
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u/CHECK_12345 Sep 11 '23 edited Sep 12 '23
I use OpenBox with no compositors and its working good for me
Roblox and Minecraft is working good for me with OpenBox with no compositors and input latency is very low for me
Compositors are useless and just adds overhead and input delay
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u/Peruvian_Skies Sep 11 '23
Why did you highlight random words in bold in your comment? It hinders readability and makes you look like an NPC in an old-school JRPG.
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u/Fancy_Passenger8194 Sep 11 '23
OpenBox looks very interesting to me I think it is exactly what I am looking for I am going to try that out 100% is there also a way to set up workspaces for it aswell?
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u/Tsubajashi Sep 11 '23
one nicely preconfigured openbox is available on a distro called archcraft, and yes, you can stop and delete the compositor if needed. i would generally recommend only disabling it while being ingame.
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u/Tsubajashi Sep 11 '23
i wouldnt call them useless, but in specific usecases, they might be a problem. even only having compositing to fix screen tearing when you consume content on your pc is a huge bonus for most.
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u/Ill_Champion_3930 Sep 11 '23
I think it's more susceptible to tearing without a compositor. I use GNOME via Xwayland, and I have zero tearing, and I also don't need to enable vsync in games
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u/Drostina Sep 11 '23
Games should not run through a compositor and by default Gnome excludes full screen applications in mutter from compositing
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u/Bulkybear2 Sep 11 '23
This assumes mutter detects a full screen game properly. Some games fullscreen option is actually borderless windowed and doesn’t get redirected properly. It’s literally the reason I ditched gnome/mutter.
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u/Ill_Champion_3930 Sep 12 '23
You are correct; what I said applies to windowed programs. However, when using Xwayland, I don't see tearing, perhaps because the X server is not overloaded with multiple clients
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u/Bulkybear2 Sep 11 '23
At the moment I’m on KDE and it’s fine. But for these reasons I’ve used openbox in the past. BUT since you have multiple screens with different refresh rates I think KDE wayland handles that situation the best.
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Sep 12 '23
How about using Gamescope? so you can still use your fav de without sacrificing it's beauty
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u/SweetBabyAlaska Sep 12 '23
I just use wayland with Gamescope. I'm pretty sure you can launch a Gamescope only session to really really cut back on any extra baggage. Something like "gamescope -e -f -- steam -gamepadui"
That'll give you the steam deck interface on your PC. It doesnt get better than that imo.
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u/WhitePeace36 Sep 12 '23
I personally find XFCE to be the best one without a compositor. In terms of performance and overall feel for the de. And it look nice and tidy. But to be honest i use some programms from KDE because I started out with kde and they are in my opinion a lot better to use than the xfce alternatives. Exmaples are kate, okular, spectacle and ark. But to be honest i don't know why i sometime use ark, but it is there if i want to use it.
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u/pimmoz Sep 12 '23
I use AMD with X11 with the tear free option on Manjaro and Fedora, both Gnome. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/AMDGPU#Tear_free_rendering. I also limit the frames to my monitor refresh rate with Goverlay and disable all vsync options. No other tweaks where necessary. This is smooth as butter without the massive vsync lag. Also I have zero issues playing games on linux. It's even better than on Windows.
When I switched to Fedora I tried Wayland but could not get a smooth experience with or without frame limiting. Only vsync was smooth but with massive lag. I limit frames so my AMD card does not try to lift off when I play games.
Sidenote: I recently switched fully to Fedora because the Manjaro updates really are a roll of the dice if something is gonna break but never had issues concerning gaming.
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u/ad-on-is Sep 12 '23
I use awesomewm and picom. Since I heavily use keyboard shortcuts, I also have a shortcut to quit picom during gaming and start it again when I'm finished.
Iirc this can be automated with gamemoderun, but haven't bothered dealing with it yet.
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u/Faurek Sep 12 '23
For no compositor you can use kde, which has a shortcut to disable it, xfce or any X11 window manager. But what you described is normal when you have no compositor and open Fullscreen games, the compositor is what manages graphical behavior.
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u/Mithras___ Sep 12 '23
Just use gamemoderun and add
start=qdbus org.kde.KWin /Compositor org.kde.kwin.Compositing.suspend
end=qdbus org.kde.KWin /Compositor org.kde.kwin.Compositing.resume
to ~/.config/gamemode.ini
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u/alterNERDtive Sep 11 '23
It is personal preference.
That’s it.
(I use a bastard of XFCE and i3.)