Using Picom for a tear-free experience in Xfce

This page contains changes which are not marked for translation.

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Compton has been replaced by Picom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


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