I have access to my girlfriend's M1 Mac Air and tried Asahi Linux on it. For those who don't know it is the only Linux that works on Apple Silicon at the moment. It also is a bit unique in that it has no GPU acceleration, perhaps eliminating a common source of eyestrain. I can say it is better than MacOS in terms of eye strain! To me, this suggest that MacOS is a major source of strain, and not just display panel. I know it may seem counterintuitive, but please try it!

It remembers your brightness from the brightness you last chose on MacOS, so you can control the brightness between restarts in Asahi in that way.

Also, you can keep your MacOS install, it does not delete it.

    degen changed the title to Mac eyestrain not the panel. MacOS -> Asahi Linux.. Great! Please try. .

    MacOS hurts me quickly, within 15 minutes, but I have been able to use Asahi Linux for an hour now. I cannot use MacOS even on an external monitor.

    How does it compare to your usual system?

      Sunspark I’m not sure actually. I really shouldn’t have posted after only one hour of testing… I will spend more time with it throughout this week.

        degen this was my experience as well on both an M1 Macbook Pro with Asahi, and a 16in 2019 Macbook Pro with Ubuntu 22.04.

        In my case (as I've posted before) it's macOS' font rendering. Blurry fonts, lack of hinting, different anti-aliasing technique.

        I've sold my 2019 MBP for €1700 and replaced it with a €330 (used) Thinkpad E15 Gen 2 that runs Ubuntu beautifully -- no more eye strain.

            pushupsandcode I had believed there was something special about Asahi Linux related to the lack of GPU driver, but now I agree that it is highly related to font rendering. MacOS seems fine to look at until I try to read an article. Then I can't focus on the text, and pain follows closely.

            Sunspark It has been a while since I used this laptop, and my previous finding that it is worse below 50% still feels true. However, I am finding that above 50% is too bright. I would like to try it on an external monitor, but the HDMI port does not yet work on Asahi Linux on Mac laptops.

            If I put aside the brightness issue, it is hard to say if it is better than a typical Linux setup. My gut feeling is that it's not, and there is no magic here.

            All of my observations are complicated right now because I have new glasses, and it was silly of me to come to my earlier conclusions. I got overexcited. Still, I feel that others would have less eyestrain on Asahi Linux, guiding people in the right direction regarding finding a solution.

                I don't think Apple products are worth the bother. Folks here want to like them so much but it seldom seems to work out these days.

                I've put 60+ hours into the steam deck. Admittedly not with 3D games but still that's a significant chunk of time. I ordered the dock for it yesterday and will see how it is on my monitor.

                  @degen I had an early version of Big Sur that I believed had a bug that did not enable GPU acceleration in the OS. It only worked on my work iMac pro hooked up in mirror mode to a 27inch cinema display (Cardboard on imac screen). It was so easy to look at all day and a very good machine, I noticed no performance issues. If I installed the wrong app such as after effects or media encoder it might have enabled the GPU acceleration. The screen would then cause eye strain and I'd then have to format and reinstall the buggy Big Sur again. Unfortunately one day my iMac updated its firmware and now I can no longer use it in this way. It'd be great if they could just give us toggles in the Mac settings to disable these things (GPU acceleration, dithering, etc).

                    a month later

                    thorpee I had a similar experience. I was fine with some beta versions of Big Sur and Safari 14, but then when it was released it really bothered my eyes. Monterey was the same. If I use Catalina and Safari 13 I'm fine. Something changed with graphics in Mac OS 11 and newer. Unfortunately, the Apple Silicon machines can't run versions older than Big Sur, so I can't really test this on newer machines. But my 2017 MBP I can literally boot back and forth between Catalina and Big Sur and back and my eyes are fine, then they hurt, and then fine again. If I upgrade Safari to 14 or 15 on Catalina my eyes hurt, even though the rest of the apps and OS are OK. Its so weird.

                      4 months later

                      So did linux on apple silicon laptops solve the eye strain? Or eye strain is still there but lower?

                      4 months later

                      Perhaps you should try disabling GPU acceleration on other hardware or distros. In my experience llvmpipe is quite comfortable for my eyes

                      Sunspark

                      If running Linux is your plan, there are other vendors that sell hardware for a lot cheaper. And with much better supported hardware and software. Apple "silicon" is an ARM chip. I'm not sure how many software vendors are writing software for ARM.

                      I tried Fedora on Apple a long time ago. It kinda worked. A lot of stuff did not work.

                        a month later

                        Update: I reinstalled Asahi Linux recently on my M1 MacBook Air, and I definitely have eyestrain with it. I'm not sure if it's me or if the software changed. I do better with macOS, but it's far from great now, especially when compared to a year ago. Somehow now I do best on modern Windows paired with my Intel Arc A770 LE, which recently has an available VBIOS update which I refuse to perform.

                          degen Update: I reinstalled Asahi Linux recently on my M1 MacBook Air, and I definitely have eyestrain with it

                          Fedora recently rebased their reference version on Fedora. If you installed it that recently, it could be possible something causing issues was inadvertently changed.

                            4 months later

                            degen which win build? And what motherboard? Gonna test the a770 myself!

                              dev