Hello, After years of basically impossible to work on any linux desktop for more than a few hours I finally found a linux distro that fixes my eyestrain and does font rendering correctly. It's an Arch based rolled distro that is very mature called: MANJARO https://manjaro.org/ I run the gnome desktop manager (Aldo i don't like it, it gives me the best font rendering and color combination) with the default settings and it's been great. Apparently Manjaro changes the Arch Linux font settings to a sort of Freetype2 font and they do it correctly. Please let me know if you have any questions or what your experiences are. Cheers

Vic Very interesting, should be possible to port the distro changes to others as well 😃

Vic Can you find out what changes were made in the ditro to make it work vs other distro's? And congrats onthe find!

Vic The current regular Arch Linux is not usable for you?

Of all the sytems, I have tried this causes the least strain thus far. Monjaro I mean I made a comment on the Manjaro thread and they basically called me crazy. much disagreement. I am using the XFCE edition. i am pretty sure it has zero color management. but dont quote me https://forum.manjaro.org/t/why-manjaro-causes-less-eye-strain-than-other-distros-of-linux/25686

I use regular Arch and currently it is very usable for me, too. I believe we should share our graphics cards, drivers we use, desktop environments, font settings, and any compositing settings. My setup: Graphics Card: NVIDIA Quadro NVS 295 Driver: nouveau + xf86-video-nouveau Desktop: Xfce Font settings (in Xfce Appearance): Antialiasing on, Antialiasing method: subpixel rendering (RGB ), Hinting slight, no custom DPI Compositor: Xfce compositor, enabled (in Windows Manager Tweaks), Vsync on Also look for any existing local or global configuration files that may override or set font settings silently ( https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Font_configuration ). There may also be .conf files in /etc/X11 and subdirectories that change video output. There may be files in your home directory that tell your graphics driver to use special settings. The only other thing that I know I did is to try to make sure that temporal dithering is turned off by running an xrender command. But that's specific to the nouveau kernel mode driver and is probably a placebo because it should be turned off by default anyway ( https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/Dithering/ ).

KM KM Also look for any existing local or global configuration files that may override or set font settings silently ( https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Font_configuration ). There may also be .conf files in /etc/X11 and subdirectories that change video output. There may be files in your home directory that tell your graphics driver to use special settings. Great Input. Valuable info that i would have had to comb throught text to find. KM The only other thing that I know I did is to try to make sure that temporal dithering is turned off by running an xrender command. But that's specific to the nouveau kernel mode driver and is probably a placebo because it should be turned off by default anyway ( https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/Dithering/ ). This as well. hard to believe its just a command line away. If i may. Can I ask which type of lights you use? Also, do you have a monitor that utilizes dithering? Thank you. KM My setup: Graphics Card: NVIDIA Quadro NVS 295 Driver: nouveau + xf86-video-nouveau Desktop: Xfce Font settings (in Xfce Appearance): Antialiasing on, Antialiasing method: subpixel rendering (RGB ), Hinting slight, no custom DPI Compositor: Xfce compositor, enabled (in Windows Manager Tweaks), Vsync on My Setup: Graphic Card: RX 570 Driver: AMDGPU-PRO, same as AMDGPU (opensource version) but with a proprietary overlay. Going between both. Desktop: Mainly still Ubuntu, Also Windows and Manjaro Font settings: stock in all systems Compositor: just installed unity-system-compositor to see if it makes a difference.

Wrightpt1 If i may. Can I ask which type of lights you use? Also, do you have a monitor that utilizes dithering? Thank you. I mostly don't use any lights. If I do, it's good old 60W E27 incandescent bulbs. The monitor BenQ EW2740L I currently use should not use temporal dithering.

I found a Linux distro that fixes my eyestrain with the default setup!!

Wrightpt1

KM Thank you.

Is this the best VA panel you have used thus far?

KM

Wrightpt1 It's by far the best and sadly hard to get nowadays.

Wrightpt1

KM Hard to find is right. I am deciding between getting that monitor and the Samsung Va with Quantum color that felt like a backrub when i looked at it.

Your graphics card is so cheap as well. That looks extremely temping. maybe my RX 570 is not the best for me. This is so depressing but i i will decide.

Does covering up your leds on your tower with black tape fit the bill for you. Are you able to work and focus without strain with the tower in the same room? Can I ask if the gaphics card you use has any leds on it?

Wrightpt1

Wrightpt1 Also, daylight does not seem to work with me sadly. quite a bit jealous i must say. I mean is your eye strain all but figured out with this set up. Very usable is envyable.

Are you using the XFCE desktop environment on Arch? Which font do you currently use? I am currently using DejaVu Sans ExtraLight. I am going to see how it goes with the arch installation verses Manjaro i think.

KM

Wrightpt1 I covered all my tower's LED with the tape, even the inner power LED, directly on the mainboard. Some of the LEDs flicker at 50 or 100 Hz. I'm sensitive to that. The graphics card has no LEDs.
The setup is not perfect, for I still have to keep the brightness low. But at least I don't have to down-regulate the contrast anymore, so I have a good picture.

I'm using Xfce and most probably the font "Deja Vu Sans Book". It says just "Sans" but it looks like the Deja Vu font. I think the only Arch font packages I have installed are "cantarell-fonts" and "ttf-dejavu" (found with pacman -Qs font). My browser is Chromium, and I don't seem to have trouble with the web fonts it downloads and displays on some pages.

Vic

ensete I think the biggest difference with Manjaro is the font rendering magic they do on it using the Freetype2 package.

No other distro has done it with so much detail and less eye fatigue in my opinion.

I ran for long time the default Arch setup but never could get it to work as nice as the default Manjaro, and since Manjaro is Arch rolling release linux with an easy installer you get all the good stuff without the install headache.

Any one else feels the same about Manjaro?

Oh and now I moved again from Gnome to i3wm on Manjaro. I just like tiling window managers, so productive, it's crazy. I hate working with the mouse :-)

Cheers,

JTL

Vic There was a time long ago when I was using just twm on an ancient Pentium4 era laptop 😃

KM

I noticed that Windows 10 Enterprise LTSB 2015 is still better for my eyes. I don't know why, but I can increase my monitor's brightness on Windows and still have no problems, but on (Arch) Linux I pretty soon have the urge to turn the brightness all the way down and still get some small eye strain after prolongued exposure.
My combination of graphics card and nouveau driver might not be the optimal choice for Linux. But neither is NVIDIA's driver. I'm out of ideas on how to make Linux as eye-friendly as Windows on regular desktop PCs. Exotic ARM solutions (for example an ODROID-C2 board) might work but they are still a little too slow for everyday usage, not to mention serious working. And there's not much choice for the x86 desktop: NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel's integrated graphics. On top of that, I noticed that modern graphics cards tend to upscale everything to the monitor's default resoultion. Even BIOS text mode is displayed as "1080p". No drivers are loaded in text mode, so that's a hardware thing.

K-Moss

Vic Any updates from anyone on Manjaro? Is it still the best operating system for eye comfort? Almost 7 years since this thread.

reaganry

K-Moss i think specifically manjaro XCFE. there are other threads on it

dzwdev

i was using hp elitebook 2560p with windows 11, i had a lot of eye strain after few minutes of using it

then i changed to dell latitude 7480 with manjaro, now i can work hours in the laptop without eye strain

AlanSmith

dzwdev The problem is not Windows 11. On my old HP EliteBook 8470p, the eyes also hurt. Your HP EliteBook 2560p is no exception. PWM total 200Hz | At the same time, Dell Latitude 7480 without flickering. Dell safe for your the eyes | Before buying a laptop, see reviews on the website notebookcheck

ensete

AlanSmith For many the problem absolutely is the OS. Don't assume because something does or does not impact you it does or does not impact others.

DirectX12 acceleration and 3D compositing are at the root of my BVD issues with Windows, and thats 100% due to them being implemented in Win 10 and Win 11

ensete

Recently installed Lubuntu 18.04 on some old hardware and zero eye strain.

reaganry

ensete lubuntu is better for you than xcfe options, manjaro etc?

orangepeel

ensete What Linux kernel are you using? I use Ubuntu 18.04 with Linux kernel 4.15.0-x and I have no eyestrain. Ubuntu 18.04 has two different kernels -- 4.15 and 5.4. I don't use kernel 5.4 because this kernel gives me eyestrain and headaches.

I used Ubuntu 18.04 with kernel 4.15.0-x for years. Then last year I reinstalled Ubuntu 18.04, but the display became very harsh and gave me a headache. Then I noticed that it had kernel 5.4 and not kernel 4.15. So I installed kernel 4.15, booted into GRUB, and selected kernel 4.15 and the eyestrain disappeared and the screen was easy on the eyes! Kernel 5.4 turned my good laptop (ideapad 110) into a bad laptop.

reaganry

reaganry hey lububtu 1804 working pretty good indeed. Manjaro was problematic. hanks!

Sunspark

"old hardware"

In anycase, lubuntu is lxqt desktop environment which uses the QT widgets and most of the time kwin compositor, so if both of them work for you, then KDE Plasma should also work as it uses both of those.

My problem is that while I have a working KDE Plasma environment on my deck that I tuned everything to look nice on, I prefer the Windows UI. 🙁

karut

reaganry so perhaps it's the old drivers and kernel that comes with such an "old" distro? Are you updated to the latest packages?

reaganry

karut i think so, all but apt dist upgrade. videos still seem to cause brain fog though. My current hypothesis is the kernels get updated to be able to handle the rendering on the newest games

karut

Lubuntu 18.04 support ended almost a year ago unfortunately.

Do you happen to have tried Pop OS as a distro?

reaganry

Im hopeful there will be a way to enable 'limited blacks' and that will make video useable

reaganry

karut pop was pretty bad for me. Try manjaro and let us know

orangepeel

karut Ubuntu 18.04 with the Linux kernel 4.15.0.x gets security updates until 2028 through Ubuntu Pro ESM which is free. This is what I use. On my good laptop I get eyestrain and headaches from the 5.4 kernel but not from the 4.15 kernel. Both kernels 4.15 and 5.4 are available on Ubuntu 18.04. The latest releases of Ubuntu 18.04 come with kernel 5.4, so you need to install kernel 4.15 and then boot into GRUB and select kernel 4.15.

ensete

karut Who really cares about when "official" support ended. It's not like the OS will stop working.