OpenGL support with compton

Forum rules
Share your brain ;)
User avatar
ivanovnegro
Minister of Truth
Posts: 5466
Joined: Wed Oct 17, 2012 11:12 pm

OpenGL support with compton

Unread post by ivanovnegro » Wed Mar 04, 2015 7:42 pm

You know some of us love shadows and others even real transparency or you want to use a bloated dock on your desktop.

So if you need cool but very light compositing and that without tearing or even to prevent tearing you can use the little compositor Compton but with OpenGL. It helps also with video issues on Firefox and other browers watching Flash or HTML5 videos.

On most Intel cards if you use the standard compositors from Xfce or Mate you get annoying video tearing and of course in all minimal window managers. Only compositing in window managers like Kwin, Compiz or Mutter on the heavy desktops offer OpenGL by default but that is not entirely true. I got over my laziness and read the documentation from compton and found out, yes I am late, that it indeed supports OpenGL output.

All you have to do is to start compton with these options:

Code: Select all

compton -b --backend glx
Put it in your start script or xinitrc or give those options directly to the compton configuration file.

You can of course try other options to get VSync, that is the thingy that is not supported under Marco and Xfwm4, at least not yet.

Maybe this is all old news to you then I am sorry. :)

Read more:

https://github.com/chjj/compton/wiki/vsync-guide

or have a look in the man page.

Post Reply