Using Picom for a tear-free experience in Xfce

People who are experiencing screen tearing in Xfce can try out the following method.

Compton has been replaced by Picom

Installing picom

Picom - is an X compositor which supports xrender and glx (opengl) backends.

To install it from the command line:

user $ sudo pacman -S picom COPY TO CLIPBOARD

Configuring picom

Picom is configured by editing ~/.config/picom/picom.conf.

The following are some commonly used options:

~/.config/picom/picom.conf

backend = "glx";
glx-no-stencil = true;
vsync = true;
unredir-if-possible = true;
 
# Shadow
shadow = true; # Enabled client-side shadows on windows.
shadow-radius = 7; # The blur radius for shadows. (default 12)
shadow-offset-x = -7; # The left offset for shadows. (default -15)
shadow-offset-y = -7; # The top offset for shadows. (default -15)
shadow-exclude = [
  "n:e:Notification",
  "n:e:Docky",
  "g:e:Synapse",
  "g:e:Conky",
  "n:w:*Firefox*",
  "n:w:*Chromium*",
  "n:w:*dockbarx*",
  "class_g ?= 'Cairo-dock'",
  "class_g ?= 'Xfce4-notifyd'",
  "class_g ?= 'Xfce4-power-manager'",
  "class_g ?= 'Notify-osd'",
  "_GTK_FRAME_EXTENTS@:c"
];
 
# Opacity
detect-client-opacity = true;
 
# Window type settings
wintypes:
{
  dock = { shadow = false; };
  dnd = { shadow = false; };
  tooltip = { shadow = false; };
 };

Disabling xfwm4 compositor and enabling picom

The following command can be used to turn off xfwm4's compositing feature:

user $ xfconf-query -c xfwm4 -p /general/use_compositing -s false COPY TO CLIPBOARD

Create a new file ~/.config/autostart/picom.desktop with content

~/.config/autostart/picom.desktop

 [Desktop Entry]
 Encoding=UTF-8
 Version=0.9.4
 Type=Application
 Name=Picom
 Comment=X11 compositor
 Exec=compton -b
 OnlyShowIn=XFCE;
 StartupNotify=false
 Terminal=false
 Hidden=false

Now one could logout and login again to see if picom has been activated.

To check if picom is working following command can be used:

user $ pgrep -l picom COPY TO CLIPBOARD

Links

• https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Picom
• https://github.com/yshui/picom