basharkey / linux-desktop-ansible

Personal desktop configuration playbook

linux-desktop-ansible

1. Copy default.config.yml to config.yml and customize variables
2. Add secrets to vault.yml
3. make deps to install playbook dependencies
4. make vault to encrypt vault.yml
5. make install to run playbook

Get PCI IDs for config.yml

sudo apt install --no-install-recommends -y pciutils

lspci -nn

Compositors and vSync

Great video discussing compositors, vsync, and screen tearing.

Basically if you do not care that much about latency (i.e. not using your system for FPS gaming) you should enable vsync on your GPU drivers and use a compositor (Picom) without vsync for the best tear free experience.

For Nvidia on X11 you can enable vsync by adding {ForceCompositionPipeline=On, ForceFullCompositionPipeline=On} to each display in your xorg.conf:

Section "Screen"
    Identifier     "Screen0"
    Device         "Device0"
    Monitor        "Monitor0"
    DefaultDepth    24
    Option         "Stereo" "0"
    Option         "nvidiaXineramaInfoOrder" "DFP-2"
    Option         "metamodes" "DP-1: 1920x1080_60 +0+180 {ForceCompositionPipeline=On, ForceFullCompositionPipeline=On}, DP-7: 1920x1080_60 +4480+180 {ForceCompositionPipeline=On, ForceFullCompositionPipeline=On}, DP-2: 2560x1440_100 +1920+0 {ForceCompositionPipeline=On, ForceFullCompositionPipeline=On}"
    Option         "SLI" "Off"
    Option         "MultiGPU" "Off"
    Option         "BaseMosaic" "off"
    SubSection     "Display"
        Depth       24
    EndSubSection
EndSection

I have personally disabled picom because it causes stuttering issues when running mulitple GPU accelerated apps on multiple displays with different refresh rates (e.g your YouTube video will stutter when scrolling on Discord). Disabling picom doesn't seem to cause tearing issues as long as GPU driver vsync is enabled.