Linux Graphics Stack

KM I used the NVidia driver

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.

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.

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

This interesting tool https://www.ventoy.net/en/index.html allows one to load up a ton of ISOs on a stick or drive, and boot directly into the ISO instead of having to install it first.

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.

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.

Sunspark Fedora 32 uses the 5.6 kernel

I am curerntly using 5.8 , 5.6 and 5.4 were also fine as far as I can recall.

Sunspark Now, I recognize you're unlikely to do this because it's a hassle and you already have something working, but it would still be an interesting experiment.

True, and I may do it if I was 20 years younger without children

Hope that others that have to use Linux for whatever reason might find it useful and try it for themselves.
Will definitely follow along and see how things progress.