• AbstractOS
  • Eyestrain when switching from Windows to Linux

Pudentane Linux/MacOS has always been worse than Windows for me, however now I am at the point where I can use no modern OS/PC in comfort. Do you use Windows 10 and experience discomfort? Also, do you have any known eye conditions? (e.g. amblyopia/strabismus)

This issue which many devs seem to think is just a pesky little ‘bug’ is affecting people’s health. I can’t overstate the seriousness of this issue, however I’m sure you’re well aware of the discomfort we’re all going through.

I just feel like in the right hands this problem could be patched within 24hours.

Another way to measure differences is using the PCoIP protocol. It transmits a pixel perfect Remote Desktop to the client. When I tried a cloud gaming trial (Shadow PC) I suddenly developed the same symptoms on my good machine as a bad one. The cloud machine was latest W10 with Nvidia Quadro graphics. Others here noticed when streaming using Steam there are symptoms streaming from a bad machine but no problems from an older build. IMO it’s all about the pixels.

    diop Linux/MacOS has always been worse than Windows for me, however now I am at the point where I can use no modern OS/PC in comfort.

    Are you using a laptop? Which panel is it, TN or IPS? It matters, because this Zbook of mine got the worst possible TN-panel, which alone is causing me plenty of discomfort. However, I can distinguish between those things and crappy panel is something I can still live with, but the eye-strain on Linux is a total no-go and I've had it on all kinds of displays. It's always there. I can't work like that, but I seriously want to leave Windows. I'm tired of their experiments on people.

    diop Do you use Windows 10 and experience discomfort?

    I'm still on 8.1. However, when I first got this laptop it had W10 preinstalled and no, I didn't detect any visual problems other than those related to the panel.

    diop Also, do you have any known eye conditions? (e.g. amblyopia/strabismus)

    I do have a little problem, which I believe I got from Linux years ago when I was still unaware of it. I think it's antimetropia/anisometropia. One is plus, the other one is minus. Maybe it was just a coincidence, but I repeat, my sight got worse when I was still using Linux (Debian), and because of that I had to move back to Windows because I couldn't take it no more. However, since it doesn't bother me when I'm Windows, I presume, it hardly matters? Not to say I don't have to go see ophthalmologist, but it's not going to change how things are on *nix systems, is it?

    diop This issue which many devs seem to think is just a pesky little ‘bug’ is affecting people’s health. I can’t overstate the seriousness of this issue, however I’m sure you’re well aware of the discomfort we’re all going through.

    Obviously, the low-profile nature of the issue, a number of collateral factors and exceedingly small number of people affected by it leads to disbelief and negligence on part of devs, therefore it is our duty to bring this to urgency.

    diop I suddenly developed the same symptoms on my good machine as a bad one.

    It happened with me once too back on Windows 7 and GeForce GT240. Something in Nvidia settings went off and the screen weirdly enough started looking just like Linux with the same level of fuzziness which soon enough made my eyes tense. I DON'T KNOW what happened, but when I rebooted the machine things were back to normal. It never happened again since.

    I think we should also contact Xorg devs, I have a hunch it may have something to do with it. Also, I will try using Wayland instead and see if the issue is present there. I honestly doubt Nvidia and ATI are to blame here. If there are any IRC users around feel free to join #xorg, #xorg-devel and #wayland.

    Pudentane Are those videos the same computer? The second one looks like PWM banding you can sometimes see with a quick phone camera test. I don't know if that is what you mean by "I didn't expect that", but if it is then that implies Open Suse is using PWM at whatever brightness setting that is where Windows is not. I have never heard of that happening. I can tell you xrandr gamma and brightness settings did nothing for me. Nor did using PWM free displays. My comfortable computer has banding like that visible on a phone camera as well...AND I am not entirely sure that test is accurate because if you rotate the phone the banding will rotate with it which makes me think its the phone shutter rolling rather than the screen flickering? So far it seems you are just discovering the things everyone does when they start trying different settings...that nothing seems to matter for the actual strain.

      vaz Are those videos the same computer?

      Same laptop.

      vaz ND I am not entirely sure that test is accurate because if you rotate the phone the banding will rotate with it which makes me think its the phone shutter rolling rather than the screen flickering?

      No, that thing is pretty consistent, have no doubts about it. I also noticed it happens on brighter backgrounds, on darker ones it's all good. But you probably know it anyway.

      Update: Switched to hybrid mode, using Nvidia Quadro now. No banding or anything weird registered with the phone. The picture looks still. However, I'm sure eye strain will be coming back pretty soon. So, it's not PWM after all. I'm wondering though if eye-strain with HD Intel could be caused by PWM, whereas with Nvidia it's something else. Is it possible that we are dealing with different issues here which produce similar side-effects?

      Update: Strain confirmed. I still feel uncomfortable on Linux and I wake up with strained ocular muscles. Since it's definitely not PWM or dithering for that matter, it must be pixel related, after all. I can only add one more thing: it seems that things on Windows are slightly more detailed in general. On Linux it looks bleached out as it were. Please, take a look at the following picture in both OS's and tell me if you can see any difference:

      It appears tad more visible on Windows and on Linux I have to move my head all the way down to see the pattern clearly, otherwise it's practically invisible. Yes, I got a crappy TN panel with poorest viewing angles you can imagine, but how come they vary in different OS's? That doesn't make a lot of sense. And no, it got nothing to do with brightness and contrast. It's more or less the same and ajdusting those doesn't make a whole lot of difference anyway. It could be the gamma alright as tweaking that did some trick, but to my understanding there should be no such difference in default settings albeit in different systems. I think something is really off here.

      a month later

      It's been some months since I used my PC. I'm currently trying Linux distros on my Windows-7-known-good Quadro NVS 295 setup, but the Linux eye strain seems to be everywhere and can't be turned off. That's independent of the browsers, which introduce additional eye strain.
      It seems the installers are OK, but as soon as I boot from HDD into the X session, it starts to hurt.
      I tried Ubuntu Mate 18.04, 19.10, Deepin 15.11, Manjaro 19 Architect so far.

      It's my left eye that hurts after 1-2 minutes looking at the desktop.

        I connected my ODROID-C2, which is an ARM board similar to the Raspberry Pi, runs Armbian and has a GPU totally different from Nvidia, Intel, or AMD (and Raspberry). Normally I use it as a server without any monitor attached. Eye strain within 5 minutes. I looked at the Xfce screen for 15 minutes and now have a borderline headache and tense eye muscles. I think there's something entirely wrong with the way Linux talks to the monitor, independent of what GPU is used.

          KM Try Mint also. Its the only Linux that does not give me eye strain. Currently i use the Mint 19 LTS

          KM , I too had similar experience with booting from installers vs from hard disk!

          After reading this thread I've installed Linux Mint as a virtual machine in Parallels Desktop on iMac. I've never seen a Linux before. This Linux VM feels completely different than macOS and than Windows 10 VM on Mac.

          It's not so bright, scrolling is smooth (just like it has to be), and fonts are not as sharp but extremely easy to read. I felt an immediate relief in my whole body.

          It's very strange that Windows VM feels very much like macOS. On the other hand, Windows in BootCamp is different and feels good. I guess Windows VM is very tightly integrated with macOS, so that is the reason.

          As I cannot use Linux for my work and have zero knowledge of this OS, I use it for reading long PDFs or text files.

            degen Which version of Linux Mint?

            It's Mint 19, a standard installation inside Parallels Desktop.

            I must add that I'm only sensitive to macOS dithering (or whatever it does). Literally any other device is fine for me.

            annv It's not so bright, scrolling is smooth (just like it has to be), and fonts are not as sharp but extremely easy to read. I felt an immediate relief in my whole body.

            Is it running in your iMac's native resolution or is it scaled? It could be the fonts themselves or maybe scaling is making everything more comfortable. I'd be surprised if it disables macOS dithering as I thought VM's run on top of the host system.

            I have yet to try Mint on my desktop, but in the past have never had good experiences with Linux. Maybe try a live USB on your iMac and see if it is still comfortable.

            • annv replied to this.

              diop Is it running in your iMac's native resolution or is it scaled? It could be the fonts themselves or maybe scaling is making everything more comfortable.

              The "Scaled" setting is used. Might be the reason.

              diop I'd be surprised if it disables macOS dithering as I thought VM's run on top of the host system.

              It says something like "Parallels accelerated video adapter", so it should be using the same graphics as the host OS. However it feels different.

              2 months later

              A little update.

              I've had some time over the last week to mess around again in Linux testing some more things with the Nvidia proprietary driver:

              • Tried different monitor overdrive settings - No difference
              • Tried the full Nvidia pipelining - No difference
              • Turned on full DRM debugging with kernel parameter drm.debug = 0x1ff - No errors/warnings or other messages that looked out of the ordinary
              • Enabled DRM KMS for the Nvidia proprietary driver, and had the Nvidia kernel modules load as early as possible in the initramfs - No difference
              • Made sure my microcode updates were applied, and confirmed they were being loaded by looking at the kernel logs. Then I tried disabling any sort of microcode and mitigations with kernel parameters mitigations=off dis_ucode_ldr - No difference
              • Tried switching from RGB output to YCbCr444 - No difference

              I then decided to go dig out my old PC I built from 2007 (Q6600 quad core, ATI 3870's in Crossfire) and install Linux on it. My current "new" PC I've been testing with is a build from 2015 (4790k, GTX 970 SLI)...

              HUGE difference. Everything is so much smoother. I noticed immediately how moving my mouse cursor around felt as smooth as my new computer did on Windows. Same with moving dialogs and windows around. And NO eyestrain. Checking the display settings with xrandr shows dithering is off by default on these old ATI 3870 cards.

              So something with my 2015 system just does not sit well with Linux apparently. Whether that's just Nvidia being as bad as a lot of people have said it was with Linux, or some other component (MB, CPU, etc) that just doesn't work well in Linux. I was going to take out one of my 3870's and throw it in my 2015 rig to rule out another component, but I didn't want to tear apart my new PC and have to re-wire everything I did so nicely back when I built it.

              So at this point I'm very much thinking of just using Windows 7 for the remainder of the year until Ryzen 4000 and Big Navi, and then building a new PC and switching to Linux (will have a Win 10 dual boot for games); ditching Intel and Nvidia.

                dev