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

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 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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

"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.

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

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

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

karut

Lubuntu 18.04 support ended almost a year ago unfortunately.

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

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

If you try a Linux distro, the first thing you should do is make sure the desktop itself is not using hardware acceleration. For example, on my currently "safe" machine that I have set up with Debian Bookworm, Xfce and Xfce's compositing disabled, if I instead boot Fedora, I get instant severe eye strain. And the reason seems to be Fedora's hardware-accelerated Gnome desktop.
Of course, there could be hardware and driver combinations for which Fedora is perfectly usable. But this was just an example to keep in mind that most probably hardware acceleration is causing this eye strain, and that includes certain applications, too. To rule applications out (i.e. web browsers), simply stare at the desktop while waiting for the eye strain to kick in. If it doesn't kick in, only then can you move on to test applications.