Question to help me increase my understanding on what’s going on in the Linux desktop stack. I’ve heard Gnome doesn’t support VRR while KDE does.
Why does this matter, isn’t Wayland or X11 the one that would ultimately need to support VRR? Basically when running a game that I want to use VRR with, why does it matter what my desktop environment is doing?
Yes, it does matter, it’s a feature of your monitor that you just cannot use on gnome. Wayland DOES support VRR, it’s had a protocol for it for a while now. GNOME doesn’t support it yet. VRR works perfectly fine on KDE Plasma Wayland and Hyprland (standalone wayland compositor).
So can you just swap compositors for Gnome or is Gnome reliant on their own compositor (Mutter)?
Gnome is tightly integrated with mutter and doesn’t support other compositors. Same is true for KDE with KWin.
Not necessarily true, you can switch say Kwin for Mutter or something else for example. People have successfully done it in the past.
It’s just not at all straight forward, nor supported, nor recommend, likely very unstable especially under Wayland, amongst losing out on features that rely on integration between the DE & compositor.
It’s possible to do, but; why even bother? it’s not really worth it.
No, I just use the KDE Plasma sesktop