What is your refresh rate and what FPS are you getting? I've never met anyone that wanted to see screen tearing, so this is new... But you have to be getting FPS that outruns your refresh rate to get any tearing, usually by a lot.

I've basically never ran vsync or freesync or any of those things, but I haven't actually seen screen tearing in years because high refresh rate monitors have become basically the norm (outside of office buildings). The FPS needed to cause the tearing is a higher bar to clear, and if there is tearing it is on the screen for such a small fraction of a second you aren't likely to notice it.

Also, at a point, for most people on modern hardware, the biggest source of latency is "the meat"...

mangowm. it's lighter than both Niri and Hyprland and does a better job at what those two are supposed to excel in. That being said I do suggest you clean up the config for mango because some of the keybinds will leave you scratching your head as you can literally use one mod key for everything. For whatever reason the Mango dev decided using THREE mod keys was the way to go.

I gave up on Mint Cinnamon when I was trying to get my new build running due to persistent issues with tearing no matter what I tried. In my case, the issue appeared to be X11 so the recommendations I read pushed me to a Wayland based distro. After switching to Fedora Workstation (i.e., GNOME DE), I was able to easily enable VRR and HDR and now I never get tearing anymore; even with more graphics intensive games like CP 2077 and Enshrouded. Typically, I enable V-sync and/or a framerate cap and run games in fullscreen or borderless (preferred since it is less likely to freeze the display when I alt-tab).

I am not sure this is the minimum latency route as you mention but it solved 100% of my other issue and has been rock solid for gaming. GNOME seems to be a deal breaker for many, and possibly you as well, based on the comment about tiling window managers. Just figured I would share my own experience in the hopes it might be helpful.

If you're wondering about my issues with tearing, I did as the wiki said, enabled in global rendering config and added the window rules, this didn't work for some games but using it with gamescope did, this resulted in me getting rid of all the reasons that hyprctl monitors named why tearing was blocked but even then it just continued saying "next frame not torn" with no explanation. I gave up.

I don't know anything about latency, but I use mangowm without scenefx (the normal version doesn't support HDR, the one without scenefx does)

Keep an eye on Umbriel. It's a tiling window manager (scrolling, dwindle, master) made by the same people making Noctalia.

If you don't mind potentially needing to modify your config occasionally, it has been very usable in my experience. It already supports hdr, vrr, tearing, etc.

Aside from DEs like KDE i think the only other tiling compositor that has HDR support is sway (they added it in their latest release). Unfortunately i'm not really versed with latency stuff cause i'm not competitive, but it might be worth a look to see if it can work for you.

Edit: it seems like mango does have a version with HDR support after reading the replies, i did not know that.

I haven't fucked around with tearing and ultra-low latency, but I have bounced around a few wayland gaming builds and I've gotta say Gnome has been the most consistently stable DE of the bunch.

Others may be prettier, more easily customized, or have single-digit frame rate gains in the right settings, but they all suffered from more crashes, stuttering, or other bugs across the board.

3% higher frame rate is meaningless if the game freezes for 0.25s when it counts.

I can't promise it'll solve your problems, but I can recommend PikaOS+Gnome if youre looking for a rock solid gaming distro. Otherwise youre looking at starting down the Arch path and spending months to tweak it to perfection only to have an update roll back those tweaks.