Windows 11 is not agreeing with me. Familiar feeling of tension around my eyes which I know will progress to nasty muscle pain and headache if I persist through it. An odd feeling like what I’m looking at is not entirely flat, and as if I were looking at the text from a slightly diagonal angle. Hard to describe. Eyes readjusting frequently and effortfully to maintain focus.
For me it’s not the solution.
Now and again MS comes and fiddles around the edges with the rendering, but the core is fundamentally broken since 1607. At this point, with HDR, complex display driver models (always with more being added), and the desire to have ever more eye popping and higher bit colour, and visual effects. I don’t see how they backpedal on that. I am getting really pessimistic on the software angle of eyestrain.
The highly processed and flickery image is a feature, not a bug. Why would they fix it? it’s not broken, not even secretly, to them. I think what happened is I was wrong about the rendering. It didn’t change that much. What happened is that there is finally a UI which can take advantage of all the groundwork 1607 lay years ago, and so being designed for that technology it is less jarringly bad, especially as the new fonts they are using are more robust and stand up to their rendering better, but under the hood I think it’s pretty similar. Using it on a larger, modest PPI screen as compared to my small high PPI laptop really highlights that some of the same visual artifacts which have been present since 1607; like flickery squirmy text (especially where it is more thin) which defies focus, is STILL present all these years later.
Windows 10 2015 LTSB is (barely) passable for me, but to see how far things have changed for the negative, you have to go back to Windows XP. Now that is real stillness and flatness in an image and true relaxation for the eyes and brain. It blows Windows 7 out of the water for comfort, even though many of us would call that a safe OS. For sure XP isn’t the answer (unless you keep it offline), but the progression over time is illustrative.