Hello all, I've been a Windows 7 user for the past 10 years and with it reaching it's end of life come early next year I've had to decide what OS I will be moving to. I'm not a huge fan of Windows 10 with all the telemetry it does, so I've decided what I'm going to do is move to Linux as my main everyday OS, and dual boot Windows 10 for gaming only. I've always disabled Cleartype in Windows as I preferred the sharp single pixel width of fonts such as Arial, Verdana, etc. I do keep "font smoothing" on though which does apply some antialising to particular fonts such as the UI font (Segoe UI) and various others. Having Cleartype disabled though does affect some websites that have fonts that were definitely designed with Cleartype in mind. For example, the "New" reddit font renders really poorly without Cleartype. Luckily most websites I visit still look fine without Cleartype. So now on to where my eye strain started. After playing around in the various Linux distros to see which desktop environment was most comfortable for me, I ended up choosing Xubuntu and installed that. One of the first things I had to do was mess with the font settings, as I've found out I'm super sensitive to RGB subpixel rendering which seems to be enabled by default on all the distros I tried. I can see the color fringes on all small fonts and get almost immediate eyestrain with it enabled. After switching to only grayscale anti-aliasing and turning font hinting from Slight to Full I really liked how the fonts were rendering. Sharp and clean. After a few hours though is when I started to notice eyestrain and a headache coming on. When I jumped back over to Windows the problem immediately subsided. So I decided to dig deep into the various font settings I could try in Linux. First I calibrated my display in both Linux and Windows with my i1 Display Pro to D65, 2.2 gamma, at a monitor brightness of 120 cd/m2. This was to rule out the gamma as possibly being the culprit of the eyestrain which I know can cause it. I then installed the MS fonts to see if it's just the font type I'm more used to. I set Segoe UI as my system font and went into Firefox and set the defaults to the same as Windows (Arial, Times New Roman, Courier New). The eyestrain remained. Even setting particular fonts in fontconfig (Arial, Verdana, etc) to not use any anti-aliasing was still giving me eye strain. I went a step further and installed the Freetype Infinality patches that have "Windows like" settings. No change. Still got eyestrain. It's like there is something imperceptible going on that's causing my eyestrain. I than started looking for other possible sources of the problem such as the highly talked about dithering. I'm not even sure what exactly it is, or if it even affects my particular issue with fonts? I tried disabling it in Nvidia X Server Settings, but the setting doesn't seem to stick. After I close and reopen Nvidia Settings, it gets set back to Enabled. So after trying everything I could think of, I decided to just stop fiddling with it, as the eyestrain was getting pretty bad at this point. But now I'm starting to wonder if the problem is psychological. Maybe I just need to toughen up and push through the eye strain in Linux for a week and my eyes/brain will adjust. Similar to the effect when you get a new stronger prescription of eyeglasses and life sucks for a few days until you get used to them. Maybe that's all the issue is since I've been looking at the same fonts/rendering in Windows for the last decade. And if that does happen to be the case, I'm wondering if I'd get eyestrain when jumping back to Windows? My main monitor is a 27" 1920x1080 IPS 60hz display. I've been meaning to upgrade to a 27" 1440p@144hz panel for a while now. I know that the increased DPI would improve the font rendering somewhat. Obviously jumping to 4K would be even better as far as font rendering goes. But since I game, I don't want to spend a fortune on GPU(s) that can push high framerates at 4K. It's definitely a weird phenomenon I'm going through with this, as I've NEVER had issue with eye strain using my PC. I'm curious if anyone else has had this happen to them when switching operating systems? Thanks for anyone taking the time to read this, and I'm happy to hear any opinions/thoughts on this issue. **EDIT:** The more I read about dithering, the more I'm wondering if it IS the problem I'm having. I got to figure out why I can't seem to be able to disable it in Nvidia Settings.

@"Wallboy"#p11512 Hi there, welcome. I have tested out Linux distros for years. The main reason I never switched to Linux was due to the eye strain. I had issues as far back as 2007, when testing out distros I would notice the display seemed a bit 'harsher' compared to (then) Windows XP. In hindsight I got the same symptoms that I get now with any OS using dithering. After 10 minutes eyes feel heavy and something just feels 'wrong' about the output. Before I discovered this forum, "What's wrong with me?" came to mind a lot. If this forum didn't exist and nobody else had these symptoms, at that point I would consider something psychologically wrong with me. Thank god there is a community here, we're not the ones with the problem. Dithering in a nutshell is the rapid (very rapid) adjustment of adjacent color values to simulate the color in-between which cannot ordinarily be displayed. So when we use any OS with dither (specifically temporal dithering) every pixel is changing color values constantly. IMO this constant noise on the screen, albeit not always noticable, is affecting us. I remember as a kid staring at white noise on a TV (hey, it was the 80's and no world wide web :)) and while I didn't get headaches from it, I instinctively knew I couldn't watch that for hours. Same with dithering, I don't think it's healthy for that type of stimulus to be on our screens. Obviously by nature screens have a level of flicker (I always avoided 60hz CRT's and went to 75hz+) but it never caused the severe reactions that I get in this decade. I would get an eye test just to rule out any other issue, but things such as dithering and the effects, are a very new idea, not recognised by any official authority as bad, and also no user-controllable way to disable (yet).

So I found a possible bug with the Nvidia X Server Settings application. On my system I if I set Dithering to Disabled and then save the .nvidia-settings-rc file to /home, it doesn't set the Dithering option correctly. I had to open the file and for each line that said "Dithering=0" change it to "Dithering=2". 0 = Auto which usually means enabled. 1 = Enabled. 2 = Disabled. I then added the following command to my startup: "nvidia-settings --load-config-only". Logged out and back in and than ran the following command: "nvidia-settings -q CurrentDithering". The result now shows dithering is definitely disabled. You can also run the command "nvidia-settings -q Dithering" to make sure the value is 2 (for Disabled). Now when I open Nvidia X Server Settings, the setting remains on Disabled. Now as far as did it fix my issue? It's too late for me to test right now for a prolonged session, so I'll test tomorrow when I wake up and see if it helps.

Something I don't understand IF dithering is the issue...is why I can use recent Ubuntu on very old laptops like 10+ years old...with no strain...but it strains in minutes on anything new. Even cheap new things with low resolution TN screens which SHOULD eliminate the possibility that its an issue with IPS or hish res etc. Is the old igpu i915 or whatever everything had back then not capable of dithering? Also why do old iPads on old iOS and iPhone 4s etc not dither (or presumably since they dont hurt and are ips) It would be pretty great if an "off" setting helped because I would love to use Ubuntu on new stuff. Shame the intel gpu integrated doesnt have an off switch....but if I had to get an Nvidia laptop that would work id would be better off than now. I've not tried Windows very much because anything I have got with Windows 10 to try strained...but you and some others say its NOT straining them. (or maybe you meant only Windows 7). I also wonder if its not psychological since there is always an outlier for every factor that does or doesn't hurt....at least one example...pwm, led, whatever...but who knows.

@"vaz"#p11517 Dithering requires changing pixels every frame. Older lcd monitors had such slow pixel response times that they might not be able to respond fast enough to actually display any dithering.

@"vaz"#p11517 I read on the Intel forums that the Windows drivers will enable dithering on 8bit and above displays. Your old display is probably a 6bit and maybe Ubuntu recognises this and disables dithering. I have used Windows 10 in the last year on a 2012 laptop and it was perfect. When checking the driver in use I think it was using the same version supplied by OEM (2012 version) and not using a 2015> driver. So maybe it's just drivers, maybe it's Windows 10, without seperating it all (video output vs driver vs OS) - it's hard to determine where the 'point of failure' is. How are you with games consoles/smart tv's? This isn't just an issue with PC's for me and I can't use Nintendo Switch for more than minutes. Also iPhone 4 was fine for me, that had an LED display and I'm using a 2019 LED monitor now, so at least for me it's not LED. Also it isn't necessarily eye strain thats the worst symptom for me (my eyes don't physically strain) it's neurological. I feel spaced out/over-focused on the screen.

> @"diop"#p11522 I read on the Intel forums that the Windows drivers will enable dithering on 8bit and above displays. Your old display is probably a 6bit and maybe Ubuntu recognises this and disables dithering. I don't think this is it because even most modern laptops, except high end ones, are 6+2, and I have tried new ones and new displays in moderately old laptops and those displays were 6+2 for sure. So if dithering is my pain it's not because it doesn't show up on under 8-bit panels. I broke out the Xbox 360 after not playing for a year, unrelated to eyestrain, and it was fine on a TN/LED flat panel TV. I don't have a new TV to test it on and I don't watch TV as a habit. I don't like looking at modern TVs in shops and people's homes because they have them on super bright color enhancement whatever modes always and I just find it noxious more than some neurological reaction, so I don't know how they would be with regular use and reasonable settings. I don't feel spaced out. My neck and face and back of head get tight and tingly in as short as a few minutes, and that progresses into a headache with hours. It's like something is making me tense around face and head. Contrast that with staring at super old stuff for 12 hours with no problems at all...not even a twinge.

@"Seagull"#p11518 Old TN panels from 2005-2010 etc were slower than current IPS panels? Current TN stuff is single digit ms and IPS is 30ish. Hard to believe an old TN is slower when TN has always been more responsive, and therefore that's why it wouldn't show dithering.

So I've had some time today to test if dithering was the issue for me, and it doesn't seem like it. I'm still getting eyestrain. So I'm just going to assume my eyes need to adjust to the new font rendering. When you get a new prescription of eyeglasses is the only way I can describe this eyestrain phenomenon. Everything is more clear, but your eyes strain for the first few days. One thing I did was download Redshift to adjust the color temperature to something really warm like 4500K. It does seem to take the edge off the "intensity" of the strain. Each day I'm going to increase it by 100K until I'm back at my calibrated 6500K, and hopefully by then everything will be Ok. And if not, then there must be something definitely going on differently in Linux then Windows. **EDIT:** Hour and half later using Redshift, and it's been a **drastic** improvement in my eyestrain.

@"vaz"#p11524 15ms is a fairly common response time for old TN, particularly on laptops which tended to be a bit worse. On a 60hz monitor that's an entire frame. I had a TN monitor bought 2001 with a 40ms response time, scrolling around the map on RTS games all I'd see is a grey blur.

> @"vaz"#p11523 I don't feel spaced out. My neck and face and back of head get tight and tingly in as short as a few minutes, and that progresses into a headache with hours. It's like something is making me tense around face and head. Contrast that with staring at super old stuff for 12 hours with no problems at all...not even a twinge. It's a mystery, isn't it? I don't have the symptoms you're getting but it's still a direct result of using new tech. I've got two machines at my desk, an Acer 2010 tower and Intel 2018 NUC - HDMI cable going into monitor. 2010 machine is fine all day, no ill effects. 2018 NUC, within 20 minutes (same cable, same monitor) I get symptoms (heavy eyes, dilated pupils, brain fog), It felt like my eyes were forced open and wasn't blinking as much. When I used it extensively (over 8 hours a day for two weeks) and then switched back to my 2010 machine, I immediately felt the physical and mental relief. I forced myself to use the NUC for that long to rule out placebo and to see how bad it could make me feel, also if I could get myself through it by using it all the time. My experience is nope. You might get more accustomed to the symptoms, but it's still affecting you in some way.

Eyestrain when switching from Windows to Linux

Bienias

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

Bienias

How is your AMD card on Linux?

JTL

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.

dimi

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..

ensete

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.

Pudentane

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.

allspark

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 .

KM

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.

JTL

KM I did test some "uncommon" AMD graphics chipsets awhile ago with my capture card setup

https://wiki.ledstrain.org/docs/appendix/tests/dithering/jtl/

setting xrandr dither property to on did enable temporal dithering "snow" as expected.

Sunspark

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.

ryans

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.

Pudentane

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.

cizeta

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?

KM

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.

cizeta

I tried removing mode xrandr --output eDP1 3840x2160_59.97 --set "dithering mode" "off"
but it just spits out unrecognized option '3840x2160_59.97'

Here's the output of "xrandr --props"

Screen 0: minimum 8 x 8, current 3840 x 2160, maximum 32767 x 32767
eDP1 connected primary 3840x2160+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 350mm x 190m
m
       EDID:
               00ffffffffffff004d10761400000000
               311a0104a52313780ed353a85435ba25
               0d525800000001010101010101010101
               0101010101014dd000a0f0703e803020
               35005ac2100000180000000000000000
               00000000000000000000000000fe0059
               32584e44804c51313536443100000000
               0002410328001200000b010a20200056
       BACKLIGHT: 375
               range: (0, 1500)
       Backlight: 375
               range: (0, 1500)
       scaling mode: Full aspect
               supported: Full, Center, Full aspect
       Colorspace: Default
               supported: Default, RGB_Wide_Gamut_Fixed_Point, RGB_Wide_Gamut_Floating_Poin
t, opRGB, DCI-P3_RGB_D65, BT2020_RGB, BT601_YCC, BT709_YCC, XVYCC_601, XVYCC_709, SYCC_601,
opYCC_601, BT2020_CYCC, BT2020_YCC
       max bpc: 12
               range: (6, 12)
       Broadcast RGB: Automatic
               supported: Automatic, Full, Limited 16:235
       panel orientation: Normal
               supported: Normal, Upside Down, Left Side Up, Right Side Up
       link-status: Good
               supported: Good, Bad
       non-desktop: 0
               range: (0, 1)
  3840x2160     60.00 + 59.97*
  3200x1800     59.96    60.00    59.94
  2880x1620     60.00    59.96    59.97
  2560x1600     59.99    59.97
  2560x1440     59.96    60.00    59.95
  2048x1536     60.00
  1920x1440     60.00
  1856x1392     60.01
  1792x1344     60.01
  2048x1152     60.00    59.90    59.91
  1920x1200     59.88    59.95
  1920x1080     59.96    60.00    59.93
  1600x1200     60.00
  1680x1050     59.95    59.88
  1400x1050     59.98
  1600x900      60.00    59.95    59.82
  1280x1024     60.02
  1400x900      59.96    59.88
  1280x960      60.00
  1368x768      60.00    59.88    59.85
  1280x800      59.81    59.91
  1280x720      59.86    60.00    59.74
  1024x768      60.00
  1024x576      60.00    59.90    59.82
  960x540       60.00    59.63    59.82
  800x600       60.32    56.25
  864x486       60.00    59.92    59.57
  640x480       59.94
  720x405       59.51    60.00    58.99
  640x360       59.84    59.32    60.00
  1280x720_334.00 333.81
  3840x2160_59.97 59.96

Maybe I should try lowering the BPC from 12 to 8 or 6? Haven't figured out how to do that yet on Intel

ryans

cizeta Haven't figured out how to do that yet on Intel

I don't know for sure -- but I think the process to disable dithering on Intel should be similar to Windows? The ditherig source code is here: https://github.com/skawamoto0/ditherig/tree/master/ditherig. It won't compile on a *nix system because it uses Win32 libraries.

But from what I can tell, it's writing to a PCI register to disable the dithering. I think you might be able to use the intel-gpu-utils or PCIUtils to do this.

(This is not my area of expertise and this is just speculation / food for thought).

KM

There is no dithering property showing up, so it's probably not supported by the driver.

cizeta

As in the process of dithering isn't supported, or the ability to control it isn't?

KM

cizeta to control it via xrandr

cizeta

I think I'm experiencing minor issues from dithering on Linux.
I keep seeing posts saying that, on newer versions of Windows 10, programs like Ditherig only partially turn off dithering or that the compositor still dithers some UI elements.
So, I'm just looking for a straight enough answer. If I switch to Windows 10 and use programs like Ditherig, will things at least be better?

degen

cizeta

We don’t know. You’ll have to try it.

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