Yeah, installing a compositor is one way to fix screen tearing. Another way is to switch to Wayland.
When using Raspberry Pi images, there are a few options for Wayland:
- In Debian 11 you can use raspi-config to switch to Wayland. This uses lxde with Mutter as the compositor instead of openbox. I had trouble configuring this hybrid lxde+Mutter system.
- In Debian 11, you can install stock Gnome and run in a Wayland session. Because the default Raspberry Pi install also uses Mutter, there are some strange settings install by default that override the stock Gnome experience. I ran into some issues with strange keybindings (super key not working and some other things). It’s possible to work around this with manual tinkering with dconf-editor.
- Switch to the Debian 12-based image and install stock Gnome. This ended up being the best option for me. Gnome got a lot of big upgrades between Debian 11 (2021) and Debian 12 (2023). Additionally, the Raspberry Pi image doesn’t ship with any settings that affect Gnome because the Debian 12 image uses Wayfire by default instead of Mutter. Porting the Clockwork Pi patches from Debian 11 to Debian 12 takes a little work, but after that everything works a lot more smoothly.