I don't believe I am, I'm using Fedora + i3 but I don't have any transparency or special fx on the windows. I do remember setting that up on my last machine but it never looked great so I left it out this time.
Compton sounds familiar, I think that's what I was confusing for wayland before. It adds a bunch of transparency effects and other "nice to haves" but I believe I had similar issues.
Drivers on Linux have always been ... non-ideal. I use the Fedora kmod drivers these days. It's held up nicely so far without any boot halts.
