I think this discussion that I posted might mislead people from the true reason of eye strain of computer Graphics.
On Arch-Linux xfce, eye strain problem is gone (unsure)
3 months later
Two days ago I installed the latest Arch Linux x64 + Xfce. Eye strain, if any, is very minimal. No headaches. Probably the best desktop distro, in terms of eye strain, I have tried so far. This is great.
Out of the box, "nouveau" driver, Nvidia Quadro NVS 295
I currently tend to believe the font antialiasing, as mentioned in other threads, is indeed causing some extra eye strain. I disabled it completely now and will continue to use Arch Linux for the next days.
I can even use Chromium (even hardware-accelerated), which definitely hurt under Windows.
Arch Linux is known to always have the latest packages. Maybe other distros will soon be more eye-friendly, too.
vinkenvvt, did you have eye strain before with other Linux distributions?
There's a convenient gui tool in Linux Mint Cinnamon to adjust Hinting and Anti-aliasing
- Edited
Slacor which is saved to gconf config.
And also applies to Gnome. Don't know about others.
Xfce has those settings, too; the grayscale setting is 'none' in subpixel options.
In current Arch, you can override (probably any) program's fonts with the file ~/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Font_configuration
A drawback is many webfonts look ugly without antialiasing, and replacing them with (preferably) bytecode-interpreted TTF fonts removes many special characters.
Maybe deactivated antialiasing looks much better on Retina displays - haven't had the chance to try that yet.
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Using standard grayscale antialiasing and Firefox under Kali Linux (GNOME) looks fine to me.
I think overriding fonts in applications might be the [ugly fonts] problem
You use antialiasing, but I was referring to "antialiasing off".
This is a screenshot, using the embedded webfont:
2 years later
vinkenvvt changed the title to On Arch-Linux xfce, eye strain problem is gone (unsure) .