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.
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,
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.
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
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
Recently installed Lubuntu 18.04 on some old hardware and zero eye strain.
"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. 
Im hopeful there will be a way to enable 'limited blacks' and that will make video useable
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.
I would suggest trying compiz as the compositor instead of what is selected as a default.
@KM You should try selecting compiz in your XFCE setup, then turn acceleration back on. I think it'll be fine. https://wiki.debian.org/Compiz
