[cford1905]

I'm running Kodi 15 on Ubuntu Server 14.04 on my Nuc i5. Everything is running great except for Netflixbmc which had a lot of tearing. Installing and running Compton as a composite manager fixed this however.

Was there something wrong with my original setup or is it generally necessary to need some type of composite manager running to avoid tearing in Netflixbmc (Chrome)?

Are there any other composite managers that would be more appropriate than Compton or was that the right decision?

[un1versal]

No idea about any and avoid them like the plague also forcibly disable compositing in xorg.conf which is well documented everywhere while enabling vsync to always on in Kodi.