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!

                There’s not been much of any discussion about Intel Arc GPUs here that I’ve seen so I’d be interested as well to hear how folks have got on.

                dev