Of course the alternative would be to set this automatically, when the nvidia driver is detected, but I guess the developers have good reasons not to do this.

I have used this variable since kwin 5.5 to fix tearing without having to mess with nvidia-specific options in xorg.conf and never had problems with stability or performance. Also when testing GNOME3, I did not have to configure anything to get a tearing free experience.

It is very unlikely that we will add any changes specific to the Nvidia driver.

(In reply to Martin Flöser from comment #2)
> It is very unlikely that we will add any changes specific to the Nvidia
> driver.

I have Mesa(radeon) and I am using "export KWIN_TRIPLE_BUFFER=0" in /etc/profile.d/kwin.sh to fix kwin's stutters. So this could be useful to me too. Also i have read here somewhere on this bugtracker that intel guys do the same.

(In reply to Martin Flöser from comment #2)
> It is very unlikely that we will add any changes specific to the Nvidia
> driver.

Why not make KWIN_TRIPLE_BUFFER=1 the default for all drivers? If it doesn't work, the user should be able to turn it off in the GUI. This wouldn't be different from the way it is handled with compositing. KWin doesn't check if the driver is buggy or not (how could it, for future hardware!), it always turns compositing on. So in the past, I had to turn compositing off manually, because of a buggy Mesa driver (r600, nouveau).

(In reply to raph.santi from comment #3)
> I have Mesa(radeon) and I am using "export KWIN_TRIPLE_BUFFER=0" in
> /etc/profile.d/kwin.sh to fix kwin's stutters. So this could be useful to me
> too. Also i have read here somewhere on this bugtracker that intel guys do
> the same.

I never had problems with tearing on all of my hardware with the Mesa drivers (intel, r600, nouveau).

Since kwin 5.12 using KWIN_TRIPLE_BUFFER=1 doesn't work for me anymore and I'm now using __GL_YIELD="USLEEP" instead. So I'm closing this bug.