• OS

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

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

    16 days later

    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.

    7 years later

    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

          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

              13 days later

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

                a month later

                "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. 🙁

                6 days later

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

                    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 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.

                              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

                              Using a Ryzen APU as my graphics card, I'm currently happy with amdgpu's TearFree option. Not only does it eliminate tearing and artifacts, but as opposed to software compositors, there's only very little lag when moving elements (windows, scrollbars, etc.).

                              7 days later

                              One environment variable is particularly useful:

                              LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE=1

                              You can start an application by preceding its command with this variable, and then its GL hardware acceleration should be disabled. I tested this with Firefox, Chromium, and an OpenGL game (UnCiv).

                              For example, to start Chromium from a command line:

                              $ LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE=1 chromium

                              It is worth to check out if this helps with applications that are causing instant eye strain. This environment variable and others can be found here: https://docs.mesa3d.org/envvars.html

                              To start a program from a desktop launcher/menu, you can use the env command:

                              env LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE=1 chromium
                              5 days later

                              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.

                                  dev