[aidenn0]

I restart X11 only when either there's a power failure longer than the battery on my UPS, or I upgrade my kernel, so it's reliable enough.

[vetinari]

Having to disable compositing doesn't sound very reliable.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

If it works, it works. And some of us never bothered installing a compositor in the first place, so it's hardly a high bar.

[vetinari]

Obviously it doesn't work if your workaround is disabling it. It is either bad hardware, or buggy driver. For the latter, it has to be some obscure hardware; popular hardware would have it fixed.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

Okay, let's enumerate.

Option 1: Wants to used hardware acceleration, fails, allows you to disable it and actually use your computer.

Option 2: Wants to use hardware acceleration, fails, refuses to allow you to disable anything, literally cannot display graphics.

One of these works, even degraded. The other does not.

[vetinari]

I don't dispute that. My claim was, that both options you mention are broken, and for that one "working", "limping" would be a better term.

Certainly not something you would architect a display system around.

[aidenn0]

I have been using linux for over 20 years and reliable hardware acceleration has always been more "miss" than "hit." This goes all the way back to having to disable hardware cursors on my very first linux setup. I hear the amdgpu driver is pretty solid, and the i915 driver I use on my laptop is great. Nvidia is just a mess (nouveau and the nvidia binary drivers are differently buggy) and the radeon driver is complete garbage.

[aidenn0]

Not obscure, just old. ATI Radeon HD 5000 series.