I am very glad that I have found this website. I thought I was the only one, but there's a whole community!

I am getting eye strain on a Linux laptop, and I'd like to see if I can get some help on it and possibly fix the problem.

I have a Framework 13 laptop and I installed Linux (Fedora with GNOME). And whenever I use this laptop, I get eye strain pretty quickly.

The strangest thing is that I have a MacBook Pro M1 14" and an Android phone (Pixel 6), and I don't get any kind of eye strain on these devices. In fact, I have never experienced any eye strain before with any devices. I tried to match the fonts and their sizes on Linux to my MacBook's as much as I could. My Android phone uses smaller font sizes and probably very different fonts.

It's very difficult for me to exactly describe my eye strain, but when I read a webpage or any kind of text, it almost feels like the fonts are sparkly or glowing. Then I quickly feel that my eyes are getting very tired and I guess itchy might be a way to describe it, if it makes sense. This is especially bad on a white background. Darker backgrounds are better but not entirely.

Here are the things I tried out.

  • GNOME night light: I used dconf to set the night light value to 5500, which helped a lot.
  • Display brightness: Reducing the brightness helped me a lot as well.
  • I read from somewhere that MacBook's font rendering includes grayscale antialiasing, no hinting, and stem darkening. Though I am not sure if that's correct, I tried them out anyway. I found that using subpixel antialiasing made my eye strain worse very quickly, and grayscale seemed better. Stem darkening, especially for autofitter, seemed to help as well. I didn't notice a lot of difference with no hinting.
  • I also tried different values for lcdfilter, e.g., lcdnone, lcdlight, etc. When I tried lcdnone, I felt that it changed font colors at the edges, so I didn't want to use it. When I tried lcdlight, I felt that my eye strain was worse. So I changed back to the default.

Although some of the above things helped, I am still getting eye strain and I'd like to fix it. I wonder if anyone has similar problems here and if there's any solution.

    Install Windows on it so you have a frame of reference to compare against.

    Just to try out something quick, I installed Windows 11 on a VM. Fonts are more blurry but it doesn't look like it's giving me eye strain. I don't know if it's going to be different if I run Windows natively.

    It will be different. When you're using a VM you're still using the Linux drivers, etc. You could install to an external drive or shrink the existing partition to free up disk space for a partition.

    You're right. It is different. I installed Windows 11 on a USB stick, and it looks like I still have eye strain. I think the degree might be a little less than Linux, but I'm not very sure about that. Since I read from here that dithering is an issue for many, I tried to disable it using ditherig, https://github.com/skawamoto0/ditherig

    However, it doesn't seem like it is correctly working on my laptop. Or at least I'm not noticing a lot of difference. But even before all of that, I am not sure if my laptop is actually using dithering. I read from the framework community forum that the display is 8-bit and Windows 11 says the color depth is 8-bit, so I guess it's not using dithering? I am not sure.

    Hi Eslu, you might be interested to know that for a short time I installed Ubuntu 20.04 on my good laptop, a Lenovo Ideapad with Ubuntu 18.04 with kernel 4.15. The good laptop suddenly became harsh (worse than my T440P with Windows 10). It was harsh even when connected to my TV. So I installed Ubuntu 18.04 again. It was also harsh. Then I noticed that the kernel version was 5.04, not 4.15. So I installed kernel 4.15, booted into GRUB and switched to kernel 4.15. And everything was back to normal - easy on the eyes. Ubuntu 18.04 gets free security updates until 2028 (you just need to make an Ubuntu account).

    But I also have a Thinkpad T440 and no matter what kernel you use it's still harsh and causes headaches (although it's a bit better with earlier kernels). It might be worth trying Ubuntu 18.04 with kernel 4.15.

      a year later

      eslu I have heard a lot of rants about linux and its rendering layer nighmare. So when someone say - I get eye strain with linux, this is expected. From my point of view, it sometimes works for eye strain sufferers, because it makes something not to work properly on GPU purely by accident or due to incomplete drivers / rendering. For example your dynamic refresh rate might incorrectly implemented, or something else.

          Donux Yep, I've reproduced it on like 3 different PCs that otherwise have known good panels but become really strange/harsh/blurry/"3D" feeling when booted into many kinds of Linux distros lol.

          And it's not related to the Linux UI or text rendering, because the same Linux distros are fully usable for me if I instead run them inside of a VM on the Windows partition.

            dev