• AbstractOS

  • Eyestrain when switching from Windows to Linux

Sunspark no idea, but I don't think it really matters. Probably the latest one. I also got a response from kernel.org to whom I recently addressed this issue and here's what they say:

Thank you for writing your concerns. Unfortunately, we can only offer
help with kernel.org infrastructure, not any technical aspects of the
kernel itself. I suggest you email dri-devel@lists.freedesktop.org with
your concerns.

So, I forwarded the complaint to these guys. I also provided the link to this thread in the letter.

Who are "some folks"?

People on https://www.linux.org.ru. I created a respective thread there too and turns out a handful of them are also affected by it and they also confirmed the issue being non-existent on much older hardware.

      Pudentane no idea, but I don't think it really matters. Probably the latest one.

      I went to that forum and looked for the thread and found it. I saw two people who said it was ok, one specified that it was 11.1 so the 5.4 kernel but neither of them specified which DE they were using. It's not really a big deal to check all of them since there's only 4. I still don't think it'll make a difference as the hardware used does matter, but I'll take a look this weekend. Hopefully the installer includes multiple languages.

      (Btw, I'm not Russian, I was using computer translation.)

        So, as promised, I took a look at the Rosa 11.1 spins. They are bootable off a flash drive, which if using Rufus needs to be written in DD mode not ISO.

        Overall, old and no real surprises. I looked at LXQt, Plasma 5, KDE 4, XFCE. Of the four, I found Plasma 5 and XFCE to be the worst. KDE 4 was meh and the UI is atrocious now. The best one was LXQt. So the kernel is 5.4, and this was version 14.1 of LXQt being used here which uses the 5.11.2 QT libraries. The window manager it is using is the default, Openbox. (FYI, the difference between the older LXDE and LXQt is the toolkit library it is using. LXDE was GTK and also that they are separate projects with some overlap, but it is not a rewrite)

        While it couldn't be changed at this time due to running off the usb flash drive, of the 4 graphics drivers that are an option for use (UXA, modesetting, i915 and VESA) I believe the stick was booting up using the i915 driver which is a clue.

        Overall I was pleasantly surprised that LXQt was not awful and I will be taking another look at it again, perhaps in a different distro.

        If someone wishes to take a look at Rosa's version of LXQt, grab the torrent and throw it on a usb drive. http://mirror.rosalab.ru/rosa/rosa2016.1/iso/ROSA.Fresh.R11.1/

        • KM likes this.

        Interesting.. I threw Fedora 33's spin of LXQt on a stick and took a look. It's using a different graphics driver compared to Rosa. The image didn't look as good. I kind of want to try OpenBSD to see how it compares visually, except for the fact that I can't boot off an external usb drive with it which is a problem since I don't have space on the internal drive right now.

        The screen in Rosa lxqt of course is not as good as Windows, but it's definitely better than what I have seen elsewhere in Linux.

        3 months later

        I have the same problem with Linux. In the last years, I work mostly on Windows Machines because of Visual Studio.
        But once per while I need to change to full Linux Desktop. Yesterday I worked like 9 hours on Mint 19 with Nvidia GT1050. After 10 minutes I had enough, after 2 hours I started to take a painkiller for a headache, after 9 hours and a half bag of painkillers, I was completely wasted. I survived just to return home, take more painkillers and sleep 12 hours because of eye strain and headache.
        For me it starts a few years ago with Linux, I tried to find on the internet some solutions, fonts, change drivers, dpi, etc. Nothing works in past. Today thanks for your forum - I ordered old AMD 6570 and I hope it works. I will update in next week results.

        • KM and JTL replied to this.
        • KM likes this.

          Bienias Why do you go for that specific graphics card? Did you read a recommendation? I searched the whole thread but didn't find this model here.

              KM Not really. It's without recommendation. But I saw that other users are quite successful with old ATI.
              I choose that one :

              Because is 9 years old.
              Fits to rest of the setup.
              Has 2x DP for my Double/Triple Screen Setup.
              And was easy to find/order.

              I don't have a clue if it will work, that is why I will provide some feedback after.

              • degen replied to this.
              • KM likes this.

                  Bienias ordered old AMD 6570 and I hope it works.

                  I suspect that card is too old for the amdgpu kernel driver. Don't know how the radeon driver is these days.

                    3 months later

                    Hey! Here is my experience about the same eye strain problem:

                    • I use DELL P2415Q monitors (4k at 60Hz)
                    • MacOS on macbook pro 2015 works seamlessly (main main work station for years)
                    • Windows 10 gives again beautiful pain-free picture on the same monitor
                    • Linux gives me eye strain instantly (as to many of you). I have tried intel gpu, amd, and nvidia cards. All of them gave the same eye strain on the same monitor.

                    I have not tested playing around with the dithering, so can't tell if that helps in my case. I am closely looking for the solution as I would switch to Linux as my main work station.

                    My guess is that the problem is about refresh rate. If I set it manually to 30Hz then it feels very painful to me, then if I put it to normal 60Hz it still gives me pain. So I feel that the driver somehow incorrectly set the refresh rate. However xrandr and things like that shows that the refresh rate is around 60. So I have no technical knowledge to understand how the driver can mess it up with the refresh rate anyways..

                    2 months later

                    Pudentane I'm done folks, good luck with this thing.

                    "If it works, NEVER change it"

                    "Security risks" of running older software and OS's are 99.9% BS. If you practice common sense safe computing you won't have any issues. Nearly all viruses, malware, and security breaches still come from morons clicking links in sketchy emails.

                        ensete

                        "If it works, NEVER change it" -- 100% agreed.

                        "Security risks" of running older software and OS's are 99.9% BS. 99% not agreed. Nothing to do with it and all these vulnerabilities are overrated and you know it. Also, I don't click on any sketchy links in sketchy emails, that's so 90s dude. Not sure why people persist with it though.

                          2 months later

                          hello all!

                          sorry for eng, I am not native.
                          I can not believe this thread is exists. Linux is constantly improving. Even the version of my loveliest game with full version available only on linux that I play on linux. BUT, this incredible eye strain every time I restart using linux every years after years just kills my eyes and stopping using linux after few days. I had success to setup clear linux, fedora, opensuse, played this game for hours. Configured and messed with these destros for hours, and my eyes just become exhausted, and my blood vessels in my eyes become red and noticeable, and the feeling that someone with a needle just stabbing your eyes.
                          I know linux is very powerful on server, on supercomputer etc. But the desktop environment just kills my eyes. I set up Microsoft fonts with anti aliasing off, and with full hinting, with as sharp fonts as on windows. BUT is still very bad. ON kde and gnome too.

                          Until this issue is not fixed I can not switch to linux ever on desktop. even now when the full version of my precise game is only available on linux only ( reason: $ ).

                          Config. Amd 3300x and nvidia 1060 gtx asus. ( both gnome and kde were used ), old config was radeon 7850 I remember I got eye strain using linux at leas 10 years back or even more .

                          Linux on my PS4 Slim is usable. Same as the PS4 itself is usable while running the PS4 OS ("Orbis OS"), which is based on FreeBSD. On PS4 Linux, Xorg is running, 3D hardware acceleration is running, and no eye strain. I was about to look for buyable graphics cards that use the PS4's graphics chips, but it turned out the PS4 uses a custom graphics solution that is not available on the PC market.

                          What Linux being usable on the PS4 probably means is that Linux itself and the Linux hardware acceleration code is not the per se the cause for eye strain, but rather the combination of GPU and graphics drivers is. Perhaps there are usable combinations out there that we can use with PCs?

                          The PS4 GPU is from AMD. As the past has shown AMD on the PC uses particularly aggressive forced temporal dithering, this info might not help us much though.

                          The PS4 Linux I tried uses the default window manager "jwm". Maybe that's a factor, too.

                          Edit: PS4 Firefox Quantum, hardware-accelerated and no eye strain.

                            KM

                            Steam deck, which will ship with arch linux is getting video drivers for the amd rdna 2 units so we'll see how that is. I did put down $5 on preorder day.

                              19 days later
                              16 days later

                              Wonder if this is helpful on Intel graphics for PWM:

                              https://superuser.com/questions/707477/laptop-screen-causes-eye-strain-on-all-linux-distros-except-ubuntu-and-elementar

                              The problem was:

                              My Linux distro sets a low PWM frequency by default, that's why all the eyestrain. Luckily Intel gpu drivers can change the PWM frequency.

                              Linked in that forum post is this ArchLinux forum post. There is a command line tool called intel-gpu-tools (link, source) which read/write values for Intel GPU driver. This can be used to increase PWM and (theoretically) shut off dithering (the links above are about PWM).

                              I also came across intelpwm-udev , a bash script that sets the PWM frequency for Sandy Bridge chips. It uses/builds upon the intel-gpu-tools, specifically intel_reg, to make a nicer CLI tool around it. Here's the GitHub repo.

                              See also this Reddit thread where I started this research. I Googled "manjoro eystrain" to get these results.

                              Hope this helps someone. I might give Lubuntu a try on my Thinkpad T430s, since it looks like folks are reporting LXQT might be not bad for eyestrain.

                              6 days later

                              Yeah, these are pretty old posts, I've seen them around, but I think it's a different issue. I've had it on all distros, all GPUs and several different displays. It's not specific to Intel, although that could well spawn some additional issues, which other people had. I also no longer believe it's dithering. I recently did what Wallboy suggested earlier, that is using Nouveau with dithering off and the strain was still there. But I suspect it wasn't always the case, because Nouveau got much much better now. No glitches or artifacts, it works pretty well. Meaning, they may have improved the acceleration somewhat and that in turn may have brought the strain back. It's just a theory, though. The truth is, nothing really helps it. It's just there, period.

                              P. S. I'm kind of back, still not giving up.

                              I tried disabling dithering through xrandr

                              xrandr --output eDP1 --mode 3840x2160_59.97 --set "dithering mode" "off"
                              But I get this error

                              X Error of failed request:  BadName (named color or font does not exist)
                               Major opcode of failed request:  140 (RANDR)
                               Minor opcode of failed request:  11 (RRQueryOutputProperty)
                               Serial number of failed request:  41
                               Current serial number in output stream:  41
                              Any ideas?

                              Can't test right now, but first I'd input "xrandr --props" to see what's allowed, and I'd also not use --mode to see if that helps.

                              dev