• AbstractOS
  • Eyestrain when switching from Windows to Linux

vaz I'd like to address this again...what driver was ok for you and A. How do I get that and set it (don't even have Windows 10 nor know how to use it honestly as I moved off in the XP days, and B. Are you saying if I put Windows 10 and that old driver on say a 2015 Asus laptop etc with Intel 5500 that it will NOT dither because it has a 6bit panel?

That Intel forum info (dithering on 8bpc+) is when using the latest drivers.

The trouble is, AFAIK, is Windows 10 will not run older XP/7 drivers. I think 8.1 drivers work on W10 but I may be mistaken. OTOH, any hardware made in say 2015 is only going to have 2015 drivers and above.

If the monitor is genuinely detected as 6-bit, I am led to believe that no dithering will be enabled by the Intel driver.

My daily driver and usable machine right now is a 2010 W7 desktop (using a Feb 2010 driver) 🙂.

  • vaz replied to this.

    diop Oh I thought you said you used Windows 10 on recent hardware and it was fine.

    I still don't believe what they claim about no dithering on 6-bit because MOST laptop panels...even on new devices...are 6+2. Only higher end stuff is 8bit. And I have tried 250 dollar WalMart Pentium Windows 10 laptops with Intel 610 etc and they strain same as any. Those have visibly low quality panels, TN, and cannot be 8bit....or I am wrong, they don't enable dithering on low quality <8bit panels (which in itself confuses me as those would need dithering MORE to look good than a higher bit panel), and that simply means dithering isn't an issue and we are back to square one.

    Wallboy So I've had some time today to test if dithering was the issue for me, and it doesn't seem like it

    How did you determine this?

      vaz

      You're right, I have no idea how to check. All I do know like I said is it didn't make a difference to my eyestrain one way or another flipping it to off. I have no idea how to go about actually checking. Need like a high speed camera or something?

      JTL

      Well disabling it in the Nvidia X Server Settings didn't make any difference to my eyestrain. With it showing set as "Disabled" in both the GUI and command line, I was still getting eyestrain. However I can't confirm if it's actually off.

      It's like everything in Linux is so intense on my eyes. Even though my i1 Display Pro says everything is nicely calibrated, and in fact both Windows and Linux DO look the same in their calibrations, it's just something weird going on that is causing eyestrain in Linux. I did read dithering is supposed to "fake" 10-bit on 8-bit displays, which might explain the weird "intensity" of color I'm seeing.

      Using Redshift for the time being to drop the color temp to 4500K helped a HUGE amount.

      • JTL replied to this.

        Wallboy Well disabling it in the Nvidia X Server Settings didn't make any difference to my eyestrain. With it showing set as "Disabled" in both the GUI and command line, I was still getting eyestrain. However I can't confirm if it's actually off.

        It's unknown if the dithering options actually work (empirical testing is difficult, not impossible. I probably could do it if I had some certain hardware I don't have 😐)

        What GPU are you using?

          JTL

          Nvidia 970 GTX

          Just spent a few hours in Linux with Redshift enabled and it's still bothering my eyes enough now that I had to go back to Windows. Uggh this is so frustrating. Has anyone tested a high refresh rate (144hz+) monitor to see if it helps?

          • JTL replied to this.

            Wallboy Nvidia 970 GTX

            That's a suspected "bad" GPU, and some revisions of the GTX 970 might have dithering always enabled, but that is weird.

              JTL

              But wouldn't I be experiencing eyestrain in Windows as well then?

              • JTL replied to this.

                Wallboy Unless something has changed with the NVIDIA drivers or VBIOS in the past year or two, yes.

                So I can't say I'm certain.

                I just went back to the Nouveau driver and disabled dithering through xrandr, and made a .xprofile in my HOME folder to run the commands to disable it on Login for both my displays:

                xrandr --output HDMI-1 --set "dithering mode" "off"
                xrandr --output DVI-I-1 --set "dithering mode" "off"

                and I logged out and logged back and I THINK dithering might be disabled now using this opensource driver. I'm not getting any strain so far. I can focus on things without my head pounding.

                Not going to say I found a solution for Nvidia just yet. I'm not prone to placebo type effects, but we'll see after a few hours...

                It's just too bad this driver runs like crap compared to the proprietary.

                Nouveau driver + disabling dithering in it has FIXED the problem for me without question. Everything now feels "still" and calm. No more of that nearly imperceptible shimmering or intensity to the color.

                Something must definitely be broken with the proprietary Nvidia drivers. When I open nvidia-settings and change to disable dithering, as soon as I close nvidia-settings it saves the .nvidia-settings-rc with dithering re-enabled again. So I'm pretty damn sure something is borked. I'm gonna go digging in the nvidia-settings source code to see if I can figure it out.

                Can't believe I spent so long fussing with the font settings when they weren't the problem at all. I should have known when I was still getting eyestrain watching Twitch/Youtube videos.

                So PLEASE, whoever is in a similar situation as mine with Linux + Nvidia. Try the Nouveau driver and disable dithering through that. And use the commands in my above post in a .xprofile file for persistence across reboots. Replace HDMI-1, etc with your correct connected display which you can see when you run the command: xrandr --props. You can than check with the same command afterwards to see if it's disabled.

                  kammerer

                  Xubuntu Desktop 19.10. And I'm using the Nouveau driver you can select in the Software & Updates dialog under "Additional Drivers": "Using X.Org X Server -- Nouveau display driver from xserver-xorg-video-nouveau (open source)"

                  Wallboy I had a similar experience some time ago with my Quadro NVS 295. The official proprietary driver introduced some eye strain, even though dithering was disabled in the driver program. Nouveau, much better. However, there was still some small eye strain that was just not there in Windows 7. Maybe one day we can reveal the differences with a capture card. I'm not sure if temporal dithering is enabled on my card by default since xrandr would only say "auto" instead of on or off. This is different for different cards. I tend to think the driver itself is easier on the eyes, not the dithering options. May be worth a try to turn dynamic dithering on and see if the eye strain is coming back or not.

                  Wallboy Nouveau driver + disabling dithering in it has FIXED the problem for me without question. Everything now feels "still" and calm. No more of that nearly imperceptible shimmering or intensity to the color.

                  Would you say it's turned your machine from unusable to usable? It may be an idea to use it for some time (a week or two) to be sure it's good for long-term use.

                  @Gleb Had similar issues using his Intel Mac and found a way to disable dithering, it then became usable and much more comfortable.

                  This is adding to the theory that the issue is temporal dithering.

                  The bad side to all this is gamers and companies think temporal dithering is a good idea, almost essential, because nobody in 2019 wants to see banding 😐.

                    diop

                    Yes it's usable now. I will for sure take a week or two with it like this to really make sure it's all good. Their are a few downsides to this driver though such as it doesn't feel like it's as good performance. UI isn't quite as snappy, mouse kind of lags in Firefox when HW rendering is force enabled. Also the fan always spins now since I'm guessing the proprietary driver is the only one that can control the "Fan Stop" mode.

                    But for the next week, I'm not messing with it anymore. My head feels like it's been in a microwave for the last week. Gotta let the eyes/brain repair.

                    8 days later

                    Did anybody try to shoot slo-mo video and compare good/bad OS? (Many of recent smartphones support such feature with 240fps)

                    Update: it's maybe worth to extract frames from each video and compare serial frames within same video

                    a month later

                    Glad this has finally been brought up. I've been experiencing this annoying issue for YEARS since around 2011 when I first started using Linux. This, in fact, has been keeping me from having Linux as my main OS, which is something you have probably heard before. The worst thing about it is its elusive nature, which often leads to fruitless arguments and criticism on part of so-called Linux savants who are perfectly immune to and ignorant of the issue. I don't think they all have just the right hardware/software, which renders it imperceptible, I think it's individual after all, and to our great misfortune people like us are an exceeding minority. Due to that our feedback mostly results in generic advice i. e. "check your GPU", "change the font" or worse yet unfounded criticism and taunting. Wake up you people, this isn't a placebo, it's a REAL goddamn problem, which, in fact, never existed on Windows. And it's not just annoying, I reckon it's pretty hazardous too as my sight suddenly deteriorated years back when I finally began to feel weird while using Linux. Yes, this is NOT a placebo but it may still take some time for you to acknowledge its existence, especially if you're new to Linux and don't expect anything like that. I've seen some sparse forum threads where people struggle to research this ugly phenomenon and provide solutions mostly hopelessly. Here is a good example: (https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/eye-strain-from-certain-video-modes-drivers.53468/)

                    The suspected culprits thus are typically the following:

                    • Temporal dithering
                    • Pulse-width modulation
                    • Backlighting
                    • Hardware acceleration

                    I could also add that it may have nothing to do with Nvidia or proprietary drivers per se, I've experienced this with ATI, too. I'm not sure, but something tells me it could have something to do with kernel or *nix display manager, X or otherwise. Yes, it doesn't happen just on Linux, but FreeBSD, too. Maybe even on mac OS. Can't really tell, I've never used it.

                    Anyhow, I still believe we are on the same exact page. I'm not sure I can help with any technical advice, but I could try and describe the issue as best as I can, that is how I personally perceive it:

                    • Seeming inability to focus sight at one spot
                    • Perceived "fuzziness" of all screen elements
                    • Constant tension in temple-side ocular muscles (lateral rectus)
                    • Tinkling and "wet" sensation in the forehead and temples

                    And if you go back to Windows the tension immediately subsides as the screen suddenly becomes crisp and "calm".

                    To sum it up thus: you can't see it, only FEEL it, therefore making screens of it is pretty useless. It also has nothing to do with our sight, GPU, monitors and refresh rate. And, of course, it would never happen in a VM. Been there ,done that.

                    Hope this minute testimony of mine will assist all of us in the long run.

                      Pudentane not all versions of Windows, but yes Linux kind of has two modes - "basic" where the drivers are barely good enough to put the screen into the correct resolution, and "bleeding edge" where they use hardware accelerated vector surfaces to render the letter "Q" just because they're available.

                      Both of these present problems. The "basic" mode probably calls some generic awful "show me SVGA 1600x1200" without providing any extra information that might put the monitor into the correct rendering/polarity/sync mode. I've seen this a LOT on NUC or small-form-factor Linux machines. These are used primarily for compute, and nobody ever logs into them. It looks really dreadful, even to people without our problem.

                      The other problem, however, is even worse because "normal" people just see that it's lightning fucking fast and don't care that it has full motion antialiasing and temporal dithering which are probably ok for video games but not text.

                      The likely culprits you mentioned line up well with what we look at here. It very likely has far more to do with dithering and rendering (what you call hardware acceleration we call "rendering artifacts") than with PWM or the lighting, but some people are sensitive to those, also.

                      The good news is that people in here have had SOME luck turning off those advanced features in certain Linux distros. I know this forum isn't easy to search, so hopefully they chime in here.

                        Im a Windows 7 user. I have lately tried Ubuntu 18.4 on my old machine which I havent used for a long time... i5-3470 and GT210 and it was nice I have tested it for couple of hours learning new things on linux... so I thought I will maybe make this my OS for internet and dualboot W7 for my gaming library (I like old games). I remember I was in GPU options and driver installed was not from nvidia I have changed it to nvidia native.
                        Next - I havent straight away installed it on my main PC instead I just did run it without install to test. And STRANGLY I have felt eye strain by just 10 minutes at desktop!? I have noticed here the driver wasnt nvidia too couldnt change it cause I would have to install it but no free hdd as for now.
                        Could driver make that kind of difference? Or just different PC/different gpu+ubuntu is just giving eye strain and nothing can be done about it?

                          dev