Hi all! I noticed half a year ago that I have eye strain and headaches from Linux, no matter which distro and desktop manager I used. The distro I started to notice it it’s pop os. I had this os and in the beginning I didn’t had any problem with it. It started half year ago. BTW, I’m using kde plasma as desktop manager So I had an idea, why not to install the pop os distro from the same usb I installed the fresh one half year ago and then check what can be the differences. So I did it. Now I have a the pop os before the eye strain problem and the pop is after the eye strain problem. My PC have nvidia rtx 3060, i9 without hdmi. Excluding the nvidia dithering which I disabled from the nvidia server(which helped), First thing I noticed between the distros is the nvidia driver which was newer in the eye strain os. So I downgraded the nvidia driver to the same version of the regular os without eye strain and still I had eye strain. The second thing I noticed is the kernel version. The old one is 6.2.6 and the new one is 6.8. But I assume the kernel version isn’t related to how the screen show the elements, it’s related to deep stuff of Linux. The two differences I wrote is the only one I saw between the two. I tried to change display settings, font settings, and some stuff related but didn’t helped to the eye strain. So now I’m consult with you guys, what can be the thing which can cause the eye strain in your opinion? Now that I have this two os, I can test it and see if it’s really help or not.

For me it often happens when something is using the GPU. The solution currently for me is Xfce + Xfce's compositing disabled (in Settings - Window Manager Tweaks) + Firefox as web browser + font antialiasing disabled (not sure if this is necessary) + to avoid anything that uses the GPU. With the current AMD Ryzen 5600 GPU Firefox is OK for me. Some GPU applications can be OK (like in my case Firefox), but you'd have to test each and every one. You can quickly see when something is using the GPU by installing nvtop (also works for AMD). For the problematic GPU applications, using their "software rendering" option (if existing) is not always helping. The Plasma desktop, for example, is GPU-accelerated. I can only speculate that in between the different OS versions something was added that caused pixel flicker that causes eye strain. No one here really knows what's going on in such cases. We'd need a graphics driver expert, but we don't have one here in this forum yet for Linux. Perhaps it's your GPU-accelerated web browser that is causing the eye strain after it received an update, because nowadays the thing we look at most is usually a web browser. Or whatever GPU-accelerated applications you primarily use.

twomee But I assume the kernel version isn’t related to how the screen show the elements the kernel version definitely CAN affect things fyi

KM i will give a shot for the Xfce + all the settings you mentioned, thanks for the suggestion! how can we be that the Xfce will be safe always? i mean, in some point, Kde is not safe for us, it can occur also with Xfce? how do you knew that kde is GPU-accelerated while the Xfce is not? there are another desktop manger which is like Xfce? i thought that in linux it will be simple to solve our eye strain because is a system which we build on our hands, not like windows. im disappointed from the part we cant really control on our linux system so if the Xfce is safe for me, your right and its related to the GPU-accelerate. how can we solve it and use again in Kde? DisplaysShouldNotBeTVs so how can i investigate if its in the kernel part? all we know is that i had kernel 6.2.6 version and now i have 6.8.0.

twomee there are another desktop manger which is like Xfce? I've usually had good luck with the MATE desktop environment in the past, it's very similar to Xfce as both use the "panels" approach to the desktop, and I remember that it had a toggle to disable the compositor entirely FWIW, on my old 2012 Windows laptop with Intel HD 4000: MATE desktop + version of arch linux from around mid-2019 was usable (back when I used this, I was very productive on the laptop). Back then I used it combined with swapping out the default compositor with some modern fork of the 2000s-style Compiz+Emerald compositor — forgot which. Other times I used it without any compositor at all. Both were pretty good. Not sure about the "default" compositor as I didn't use it for long before changing it due to wanting to be able to more heavily customize the UI. Windows 8.1 + ditherig.exe is very usable (laptop is old enough to actually get real improvement from ditherig). I am also very productive today using this setup and Win8.1 is also working great to remote desktop into Macs without strain via the NoMachine app. Ubuntu 22.04 with the default GNOME desktop is NOT usable! (I can see it dither with my own eyes) This doesn't really say much about modern laptops, but I've always found MATE much more "easy to read" than GNOME even going back to the era before I knew that my vision problems could be connected to display output.

Some findings: I found that the problem I have is related to the kernel. I updated the os with kernel 6.2 to 6.8 and found that the eye strain occurred. I tried to investigate inside the config of the kernel and found that there is a value CONFIG _DRM_ACCL which is enabled from kernel 6.6.10. There are more parameter related to this drm but I thing this is the main issue. I read in the internet that this drm is connect between the pc to the gpu to draw in the screen the video. It seems it uses acceleration now. I tried to disable hardware acceleration but it didn’t changed anything, still got eye strain. I also tried wayland, and it seems although I was in the safe kernel, the 6.2 version, I got an eye strain. I think that the investigation of wayland vs x11 will be more complicated because it more a huge thing. But I believe it uses acceleration as the new version of the kernel uses now.

That does not sound good. Having mentioned my "good" setup, I should add I still use the older kernel 6.1.0, which comes with Debian Bookworm.

KM when I configured one of my crypto mining PCs which runs Linux it felt ok for the short amount of time I viewed it's output. 7950x Ryzen iGPU and also was using 6.10 kernel. So is 6.10 kernel the latest that is safe?

twomee wrote that 6.2 was good for him but 6.8 isn't anymore and that he suspects the change for the worse occurred in 6.6.10.

Some new finding: I tried kernel version 6.3 and I felt a little eye pain versus kernel version 6.2. After that I tried kernel version 6.4 and from this version I felt the a big jump in the eye pain. So the big problematic version for me it’s kernel version 6.4. Safe on is until version 6.2

So from what I've been reading in other forum posts, more and more of this GPU acceleration in web browsers and just "in the OS" is happening? I can use Windows 10 with the latest 22H2 update for many hours, but this same hardware I have I have tried many different "popular" versions of Linux with different DE and all of them give me mostly the same feelings of eyestrain, foggy head, inability to focus on text. It sounds like we need to be able to dig into the Linux kernels and drivers in order to start turning things off so we can comfortably use these Linux OSes? I have really bad eyestrain in Windows 11 and any Mac of any kind (m1/m2/m3, mac mini, etc.). I'm convinced this has to be at an OS level and for Linux, maybe even deeper like at the Kernel level. I'm trying to learn more about the technicals of Linux and hardware, so if anyone has some things to read, I'm all about it 🙂

Linux - investigating eye strain problem

jordan

whystrainwhy a science research site said something about how they use Rx 6600 XT radeons on their windows PC without issues of Dithering but Linux it took extra steps for them to get it to work. They said they use this to modify GPU in Linux https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/tomstdenis/umr

simplex

whystrainwhy It’s interesting you brought up any BIOS from 2022 and newer

I wrote some thoughts regarding BIOS here -> https://ledstrain.org/d/2807-safe-hardware-pc-builds-list/8

DisplaysShouldNotBeTVs true 6-bit "thousands of colors" mode

If this was by default, I had this also…

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