were you using the nvidia proprietary drivers?

I think Nuveau on both or whatever came out of the box during install. Tried to install the Nvidia propetary but couldn't due to some MoK signing issues.

Anyway, the out of the box experience is shit on this front. Screen tearing shouldn't be a thing anymore. It's not like those GPUs were some exotic prototype HW nobody else has to need hours of reding forums and tinkering with .conf files to get rid fo screen tearing.

1) Nvidia's just bad on Linux because Nvidia doesn't give a shit about open source support, or about doing things the way the open source folks do. And while the Nouveau driver is an amazing technical feat, it's also amazing any time it actually works, given that it's totally reverse-engineered with effectively zero help from Nvidia.

2) If I were using a batteries-included distro,

  Section "Device"
    Identifier "AMD"
    Driver "amdgpu"
    Option "TearFree" "on"
    Option "VariableRefresh" "on"
  EndSection

would have been dumped into '/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d' for me. But because I'm using Gentoo, I had to do it myself. Not a big burden.

absolutely love the Linux culture of "don't screw it up: true":

> Option "TearFree" "on"

reminds me of a pdf viewer at some point had an option to "respect permission" or something, you could turn it off and ignore the limits on the pdf that the author set.

> reminds me of a pdf viewer at some point had an option to "respect permission" or something

Oh yeah, I always say "Don't respect" on PDF readers that have that setting. It's a very nice setting.

In regards to "TearFree" not being on by default, I expect that there's a good reason for it... maybe it adds some amount of latency (whether on hardware I don't have, or so little latency that I don't notice it), or maybe it just flat-out doesn't work right on some hardware that I happen to not have.

Regardless, deciding whether or not to set those settings is the job of one's distro.

ah fair enough, I've never bothered with secure boot, my laptop is from 2012. nvidia is usually a pain, but I've never really had a problem once the proprietary driver was installed. I thought Ubuntu made that easier.