I am not "great" at linux but use it...have Xubuntu 32bit on an old CCFL toshiba thats fine....and KDE Neon (Ubuntu 16.04) on a Thinkpad X1 Carbon 2 and previously 3 that are horrid. Xubuntu didn't work on those either so I don't THINK it's a compositor issue. My story is like many here....most CCFL I've tried seems ok....some older LED was/is ok (ipad 2 with iOS9 and Windows Phone Nokia) but nearly all LED laptops and desktop displays cause strain. I went to a 2nd opinion eye doctor (optometrist) visit today and other than mild presbyopia due to age he said its all good...suggested reading glasses but those never helped my strain. SO once again back to zero and hopeless. Was hoping there was some OS/rendering explanation and a certain DE/compositor might be a fix....but my strain happens on MacOS and Windows as well...so it goes.
Linux users...any known good distro/DE?
hpst so I don't THINK it's a compositor issue
As in you didn't try them on the older CCFL laptops?
If the above works fine on those:
I hate to break it to you but the newer modified Thinkpad's I mentioned with CCFL display might be your best bet. It's not ideal but I bet it's still better then using an old slow circa 2010 laptop.
vanilla ubuntu 18 is making me immediately much happier than win10 does (750ti. nouveau,benqEW2770)
also works great on my 'new' thinkpad T500..
also discovering chrome streams video much better than firefox..
- Edited
ubuntu went bad on me. switched to mint/mate(lenovo T500 no gfx) & seems much better.
Linux Mint 19.1 Cinnamon and Lubuntu up to 16.04.4 are the only distros i can use. For Ubuntu / Lubuntu after 16.04.5 LTS i get severe eyestrain in any monitor. Currently i use Mint with no issues with a CCFL display.
I can't speak to this thread, but I am going to soon be rebuilding a laptop from 2005, and I have identified a distro that is rated highly for its performance on older hardware, so worth taking a look at this too https://mxlinux.org/
Ubuntu Studio 18.04 has no eyestrain feel
Fedora 26 has strong eyestrain feel
------personally not like to use Linux, because a lot of tool and specifications gonna learn.
- Edited
I made a small research about radeon
driver accross different distros, maybe it would help somebody:
I tried to compare differences in package configurations between Ubuntu 14.04 (which is totally good for me) and other ones. Comparing /var/log/Xorg.0.log
I found that depending on xorg
version radeon
driver uses different acceleration method by default: glamour
for new version and EXA
for old ones. EXA
acceleration by default enables 'SwapbuffersWait' flag (that doesn't work with glamour):
This option controls the behavior of glXSwapBuffers and glXCopySubBufferMESA
calls by GL applications. If enabled, the calls will avoid tearing by making
sure the display scanline is outside of the area to be copied before the copy
occurs. If disabled, no scanline synchronization is performed, meaning tearing
will likely occur. Note that when enabled, this option can adversely affect
the framerate of applications that render frames at less than refresh rate.
.IP
The default value is .B on.
Switching glamour to EXA doesn't work for me, but maybe it would be worth for somebody else.
I also test old Ubuntu versions and found that I can't use even Ubuntu 14.10 (also uses EXA by default).
Maybe it's also worth to share our acceptable and unacceptable configurations. That will help us to find some common pattern(s):
Good
Ubuntu 14.04, Unity with default options
GPU - AMD HD5450 + with open source drivers (xserver-xorg-video-radeon/radeon 7.3.0)
Kernel - 3.13.0-167-generic X86_64
Mesa - 10.1.3
Xorg server - 1.15.1
Bad
Ubuntu 14.10, Unity with default options
GPU - AMD HD5450 + with open source drivers (xserver-xorg-video-radeon/radeon 7.4.0)
Kernel - 3.16.0-23-generic X86_64
Mesa - 10.3
Xorg server - 1.16