@JTL @ShivaWind

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.

  • JTL replied to this.

    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.

    • hpst replied to this.

      JTL

      I have not tried KDE neon on the old laptop as its 64bit and the laptop is one of the last 32bit ones made. The lcdfans stuff is too unreliable and hacky....lots of real world users have several problems. It's a good idea but for 1000+ it's not ready for prime time.

      • JTL replied to this.

        hpst I'm aware.

        If it was better I think it'd be a perfectly valid option for you.

        😐

        So close yet so far.

        5 days later

        JTL

        Does Void and i3 solve your strain? My original question was to see if there were "known good" DEs/compositors etc or if it's irrelevant.

        • JTL replied to this.

          hpst I never had any problems with other DE's, the only other factor I noticed was the crappy Nvidia 10xx cards with it's strange on screen "noise".

          15 days later

          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..

          • JTL replied to this.

            reaganry also discovering chrome streams video much better than firefox..

            How so?

              JTL well, i always use firefox, but amazon(not sure on netflix) requires chrome in linux - for DRM reasons. the chrome picture is much better than what i'm used to. havent really a/b'd it in windows, but i think it's the same there.

              7 months later

              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.

              20 days later

              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
              dev