Try watching Netflix in Firefox or Chromium. Or enable smooth scrolling in Firefox and hit PageDown a couple times. The issue with scrolling can be resolved by enabling hardware acceleration, but this isn't the default in Firefox and the obscure config breaks from time to time. Until hardware acceleration becomes the default, not an opt-in, I consider this feature broken.

Aside from Netflix, I'll sometimes see tearing even on YouTube, when I put it on fullscreen. Luckily, there is mpv with builtin youtube-dl support, which solves this problem. But I haven't found a solution for Netflix, other than rebooting into Windows, or switching to my Mac.

I wonder if there are significant differences between video hardware or drivers, or perhaps even generations. I've watched Netflix, a local HBO streaming service and YouTube on Linux for years on Intel graphics without noticing tearing, and yes, back when there was tearing when watching video on a previous (pretty old) machine I had, I did notice it.

Really? Last year when we were in the office multiple of my coworkers had awful tearing on their Linux machines of multiple distros. I’m sure it was related to their specific hardware/driver setups but still. These were workstation class machines.

I can’t remember ever seeing tearing on my MacOS machines. And I’m even using a cheapo $15 DisplayPort adapter for my third monitor.

I haven't seen tearing in years either except in somewhat exotic cases [1], so I wouldn't be surprised that there are other people who haven't either. Nor am I really surprised that some people do get tearing.

My recent experiences have been exclusively with Intel integrated GPUs on a laptop, which seem to be a fairly reliable option in terms of desktop compatibility and integration nowadays. I don't know what the current state of e.g. proprietary NVidia drivers is, but I wouldn't be surprised if you ran into more problems in terms of compatibility with the rest of the desktop system (including stuff like tearing) with those than with some of the better open source drivers.

Workstation-class machines might thus actually be more prone to tearing if they require using proprietary drivers.

That doesn't make it any less of a problem if your coworkers' machines did exhibit problems, of course.

[1] I've seen tearing e.g. when playing a web video in the Steam client, but I find that more of a corner case than browsers or general desktop use.

I actually experienced pretty bad tearing running i3 on a new (at the time, last August) Dell XPS 13, but switching to Wayland/sway fixed it and its been running flawlessly on that since.