• OS

  • I am using Linux comfortably

I'm using Fedora 33 with Kernel 5.8 on the Dell XPS 7590 now (UHD 630). It seems like they forgot to install the severe eyestrain. Really not bad at all when not looking in a web browser. Needs more testing for overall comfort, however I feel comfortable saying it's better than Linux Mint 20.1 Cinnamon on the same laptop. Although I think I mentioned before that Linux Mint is better on the Skylake desktop I have with Nvidia graphics, and that's still true.

I tried endeavourOS. It was immediately painful on the default Xfce install and the output was very noisy. I think even a normal person might notice all the static.

    5 days later

    degen I'm trying out Manjaro KDE (Kernel 5.10) on this laptop now after I saw @ravipra praise of it. I compared it to KDE Neon. Manjaro KDE is clearly better for the eyes than KDE Neon. Less tension in the eye muscles and temples. The text antialiasing seems a bit aggressive though on Manjaro KDE, but if I turn it off it's unreadable.

    Next I will try and compare Manjaro KDE to Fedora. It would be great if it was better since KDE feels at home coming from Windows. I just can't get a handle on Gnome. Fedora 34 will transition their KDE environment to use Wayland as well so maybe I will wait for that to make my comparison instead of Gnome.

    My first impression upon switching from Fedora to Manjaro KDE was that my eyes felt way less burning and irritation, but that text was harder to focus on. Need more testing.

    Post 1507 Windows 10 is just not working for me so I need something that will work on newer hardware which 1507 is struggling to support (currently resorting to hacked drivers on a Comet Lake laptop..). So far my impression is that Manjaro KDE falls somewhere between Windows 1507 (good) and Modern Windows (bad). I'm excited since any improvement over Modern Windows is welcome.

    Having fun with it as well.

      @degen , does your laptop, on which you installed Manjaro, have spinning disk or nvme?

        ravipra Nvme.

        Only have a desktop with a SSD and a secondary spinning drive, and I don’t usually install OS to the spinning drive. If you think there’s something to that I would give it a try

        also I accidentally edited your post with my reply. I fixed it now.

          @degen,

          The context is that a couple of years back I had switched from ManjaroKDE to Arch KDE in the name of building my own slimmer installation. However, when I tried Manjaro KDE a couple of weeks back, it seems better than Arch KDE. I learned several things on this during the past couple of weeks. This is all on spinning disk on a laptop. So, not sure how much mileage you would get out of this. But, thought we can compare notes. Here is what I have, for several of which I do not have metric oriented explanations:

          Mnajaro KDE version: 20.2.1

          1. Manjaro KDE is better than Arch KDE.
          2. Manjaro KDE is better than Manjaro KDE Minimal.
          3. While installing, Manjaro KDE "Open Source Drivers" option is better than "Proprietary Drivers" option.
          4. Partitioning scheme has an impact on eye comfort. Having a single partition for everything is the worst option. Best option is to isolated largely read-only partitions from the other I/O types. For example, / is largely read-only, where as /home is typically read-write, and /var is largely write-only. So, minimally having separate partitions for /, /var, and /home would be good. Separating /boot also may be a good idea. Another variation is to have /var and /home to use the same partition and doing bind mount for /home. Using this separation, I am able to use Manjaro KDEcomfortably on what we would call a crappy (laptop) monitor!
          5. If you are using ext4, it may take upto a couple of hours to do lazy initialization after formatting, where disk writes will be higher. Its better not to judge the display quality during this time.
          6. The urge to turn-off sub-pixel rendering (SPR) means the installation is already under trouble. In my experience, SPR itself is not the problem, its the slowness of something that is giving the strain. I could easily tolerate SPR on Gentoo KDE (after tuning the USE flags a lot), and FreeBSD KDE (out of the box). The problem with these distributions is that its very difficult to get some things working, such as audio, zoom, slack. Its not impossible, but need to put in a lot of effort. Else, I would switch to FreeBSD KDE without a second thought!

          Hope this helps.

            ravipra Have you tried KDE Neon and made any comparisons? It's quick to install, or you can run it off a USB stick to try it out.

                KM Can you describe the known-good VNC connection in more detail?

                  K-Moss , I tried it an year back or so, but either it was the same or worse. I will give it another shot. You seem to have good experience with it, right?

                      ravipra Yes, but my experience is limited. I've only used Ubuntu Unity and Ubuntu MATE. I like KDE Neon better in all ways.

                          4 days later

                          K-Moss , I tried to install Neon on 3 laptops. In all the three the installation (live) usb fails to boot. May be I will wait for the next version and give it a try then.

                            2 years later

                            degen I have tried many distributions on that Dell laptop with Intel UHD 630 graphics

                            Do you mean Intel UHD 620 graphics @degen ? I thought 630 was just for desktops. In any case, wondering if you ever found a distro that worked on your Dell XPS?

                                I have found Linux to vary from Distro to Distro

                                Mint never worked well for me, but Lubuntu with XFCE was pretty decent

                                KM Can you describe the known-good VNC connection in more detail?

                                • KM replied to this.

                                    Markus The Android app is bVNC v5.0.3 (I haven't tested later versions). The VNC server on the Linux computer is TigerVNC. I hope I'm not missing something - it's been a while since I've used it. I'm not confident it would work for other TV devices, too. There might be other factors at play. One of it may be that Android itself is comfortable to use on the device in the first place.

                                        KM Thanks a lot. What vnc tool/which version are using from your known-good desktop to connect to another desktop that is not save for you? I.e. which setup do you use to access ledstrain?

                                          I have used the Android TV and bVNC until some months ago. I'm using a PC with Debian 11 Xfce (its compositing disabled) since then, directly connected to the TV now via HDMI. It causes a little eye strain, but I hope to achieve a training effect. The graphics card is an MSI GT710 (first generation) and the driver is the official Nvidia driver with dithering disabled. At 4K, the graphics card only manages to output in 30 Hz. Perhaps that also contributes to less eye strain. So, currently I'm not using a VNC connection anymore.

                                          One other thing: I have also installed the latest Windows 10 on this PC, and it really causes more eye strain and fatigue over time.

                                            KM can you tell us more to the other hardware of you desktop, CPU type and generation? What means compositing disabled, how to enable that? Does current browser usage with Debain 11 cause more strain?

                                            • KM replied to this.

                                                Markus It's a very old system: Dell OptiPlex 755, Core2 Duo E7300 @ 2.66 GHz. Disabling compositing for Xfce means going to "Applications - Settings - Window Manager Tweaks - Compositor" and to uncheck "Enable display compositing". I use the Firefox browser, which has the version 102.6.0esr. By default, it does not use hardware acceleration unless it is explicitly enabled in about:config. I don't think the default settings cause additional eye strain.
                                                I also disabled font anti-aliasing and installed the Microsoft TrueType core fonts (known from Windows XP), which unlike other fonts still look good when anti-aliasing is disabled. A downside is those fonts haven't been updated in years, missing modern Unicode characters (like the search icon in this forum's search bar for example). Disabling anti-aliasing may or may not have an impact, I'm not sure about that yet.

                                                    dev