Hi guys,

have not written in a while because I fixed the problem for me on Linux and Windows.

I noticed when I install 4.15.0-65-generic Kernel on Ubuntu 18.04 it is making all of my computers better. However it is not "perfect" on e.g. ATI cards. NVidia is still the best for me.

When I install 4.15.0-88-generic or higher it gets significantly worse. Have not checked the kernels in between. Would be interested in what code change did this and if this is configurable in newer versions.

Hope that helps anyone.

Best setup:
Ubuntu 18.04 Kernel 4.15.0-65-generic
Quadro P600 (dithering disabled in driver)
Dell 2408 connected with DP

But also noticable on a Thinkpad W500 using an ATI GPU and a Fujitsu laptop running on Intel

EDIT:
Just upgraded the NVidia driver from 440.59-0ubuntu0.18.04.1 to 440.64-0ubuntu00.18.04.2 and it got worse.
Had to install 4.35 and it is better again.

EDIT 29th of March:
Still not as comfy as my Windows 10 setup. Was reverting to Nouveau and linux-firmware version 1.173.12. 1.173.16 is worse. However with this version I cannot suspend as the system does not get up anymore 😐

EDIT 31st of March:
Ok, I made it better again using the NVidia driver. Secret here was to disable dithering (which is obvious) but also "Sync on VBlank".

    deepflame The driver you use, is it the open source driver "nouveau" or the proprietary Nvidia driver? And did you notice a difference between the two?

        kammerer This is not vendor related. I could reproduce it with different GPUs. So I think it is OS related and does not affect hardware dithering.

            deepflame
            I have similar sympthoms on different cards too and on different OS. It could be also some common code that is used by drivers of different vendors. Or inproper card confiiguration by system or drm (in case of Linux).

              I plugged in my old Sapphire Radeon HD5450 (AMD GPU) to see if anything has changed in recent Linux distros, but it was pure hell just looking at the desktop screen for 5 minutes. Still the worst card I have ever used, totally unusable. I saw that when you type "xrandr --props" it shows various options, including "dither". Which ironically was turned off by default. I tried various settings, but they didn't help.
              Even got a slight headache now.

                KM Which distros have you tried?
                I'm quite comfortable with Kubuntu 20.04 dev + enabled Night Color Control with color tempreature 5600K

                  2 months later

                  Hi same behaviour here with Debian 10 + KDE + Vega 64.
                  Just for curiosity, which driver are you using? amdgpu pro?

                    I'm looking to jump into a linux hosted VM soon so I'll be posting in this thread. I don't have a ton of experience, but in the past I have noticed that Linux Mint with xfce caused me pain, while cinnamon did not. Lubunut with LXDE did not cause me problems, But this was all several years ago. I'll report back with my more recent findings

                    7 days later
                    7 days later
                    15 days later

                    The past couple days I've been playing around with some distros to see how they are.

                    OpenBSD is on hold due to kernel panic which will get addressed, but in the meantime I am taking a look at Linux for fun since I have USB flash drives as well as an external USB drive. This means I don't need to set up a dual-boot if I don't want to, I can just install directly to the external drive from a flash drive and select it from the bios to boot from.

                    Easy enough to burn isos to a usb flash drive. On windows you can use the Rufus tool (I use this the most) but a lot of people use Balena Etcher instead, which I have also tried.

                    Played around with some KDE and Gnome distros as well as the underlying families they're from. There has been improvement in the past 5 years. This is observable for example, KDE Neon is a strange one because it uses rolling-release for the KDE portion but the base is Ubuntu LTS, so 18.04 in this case along with the kernel. Compared to Manjaro KDE which uses the Arch Linux base (kernel 5.6+) etc one can observe the Ubuntu base isn't all that ideal compared to the Arch base. I noticed this as well with PopOs! (this is a nice Gnome distro) which uses Ubuntu as a base.

                    So my plan is, I want to see how OpenBSD is on my computer (I can't start X, just the command line right now) and for Linux I am thinking Ubuntu and it's derivatives are probably to be avoided and it might be something to do with compilation flags, so one thing I might test is to install Gentoo and/or Arch and evaluate from there. Gentoo is also the base for things like Chromebooks.

                    KDE, Gnome and WMs are also factors in play here because if they are compositing managers, they will affect how things appear so it is not enough to only select a base OS.

                    3 months later

                    who has a usable Linux setup? I'm trying PopOS/AMD580 & it's not great.

                      14 days later

                      reaganry

                      I use Linux for work and the setup that works the best at the moment is:

                      Fedora 32 ( different kernel versions work )
                      Intel GPU
                      Chrome (no hardware acceleration)

                      Firefox does not work and enables dithering. Chrome with hardware acceleration same issue.

                      As my monitor I use a Dell 2408WFP (CCFL, S-PVA) connected with DP.

                        I can't use Firefox, too. I connect from my Android smartphone and Android TV via VNC to be able to use Linux (and Firefox). For the smartphone I use RealVNC's VNC Viewer, and for the TV I use bVNC free. On the other end I use tigervnc server. I don't know if there is a new GPU out there that makes Linux and all applications usable when directly connected (HDMI etc.). If I did I think I would buy a new PC.

                          KM Which Linux-distro do you use? I noticed big differences in eye comfort between e.g. Ubuntu and Fedora.

                          Guess at the end it is probably only a setting somewhere but I don't know where and what that setting is.

                              deepflame Fedora uses Wayland as display server by default, and Ubuntu uses Xorg. I think that may be the difference you are looking for. Can you try Wayland on Ubuntu and see if you notice any difference from default Ubuntu?

                                  deepflame I don't know what to use anymore when directly connected to a display. No matter what, there's always that small Linux eye strain that accumulates over time. That's why I use VNC. That way whatever would cause the eye strain on a directly connected display won't happen. Provided the VNC client itself is OK to look at.

                                  Maybe there are hardware/software combinations that work nowadays, but I don't feel like buying new graphics cards which require new PC components over and over again anymore just to find out it was expensive but didn't help.

                                  I remember on Ubuntu Mate it helped to turn off the desktop composition. But it just helped, it didn't fix the eye strain.

                                  I think running a trusty old machine (could be even Windows XP or earlier) and then connecting via VNC to a new PC is an option - if you don't need multimedia.

                                    murateroglu yes, good point. Was thinking about this as well. May be worth a try. Not sure when I have time to do this though.

                                      dev