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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

vaz

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.

Pudentane

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?

Pudentane

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.

KM

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.

Peter

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

KM

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.

ravipra

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

ravipra

Which DE is it Peter?

Peter

ravipra I use Cinannamon 64bit.

ravipra

Peter , OK. Thank you.

annv

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

annv Which version of Linux Mint?

diop

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

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

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.

ravipra

Good inputs.

Wallboy

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.

tfouto

Wallboy How do you know that Big Navi won't cause you eye strain?

Pudentane

Wallboy

Hmm... so now it got to older vs newer GPUs, huh.. this is new and I definitely never had the chance to test it out at least because none of my older PCs were bundled with an LCD monitor and, needless to say, the issue was never present on CRT monitors, at least for me, which I forgot to mention earlier. Thanks a bunch for your invaluable input, I will try testing it on this older Thinkpad T60p with ATI FireGL V5250, which should be perfect for such needs. It has yet to arrive, though.

Wallboy

tfouto

You're right, I haven't ruled out the possibility that the older cards were just better and that all newer cards might cause issues. I did dig around in the amdgpu source code and seen that for the most part it's pretty simple to disable dithering through xrandr on the AMD cards. Also the code shows that when you do use dithering, it will choose a spatial dithering algorithm and not a temporal one. And if that ever changes, it's open source, so it can be changed quite easily with patches if need be. Opposed to the Nvidia proprietary driver where you don't know what the hell is going on.

I've struggled with trying to keep Nvidia dithering off. Whenever I change it to disabled in the Nvidia X server settings, and then reopen the settings it automatically resets it back to on, along with resetting a bunch of other settings I was testing. And I haven't seen anyone else mention running into this problem. So maybe it's just this particular brand of GTX 970 that's messed up in Linux, I don't know.

The more I read about Nvidia and Linux, the more I just want to get the hell away from their cards. AMD seems to have been constantly providing updates to amdgpu, whereas Nvidia barely wants to touch Nouveau and just stick with their proprietary driver.

Also with Wayland slowly making progress, it seems AMD is far more ahead with supporting it then Nvidia.

tfouto

Wallboy Wayland?

JTL

Wallboy And I haven't seen anyone else mention running into this problem. So maybe it's just this particular brand of GTX 970 that's messed up in Linux, I don't know.

I have the sneaking suspicion with both AMD and Nvidia cards that there might be some per card VBIOS differences that can cause output differences or other issues irrespective of the driver in use.

(i.e KM's experience)

Wallboy

tfouto

It's a newish alternative display server protocol to X11/Xorg that is trying to solve a lot of problems that the X server protocol can't handle. Such as multi monitors with differing refresh rates on one X screen; being able to set separate DPI's per monitor; better handling of higher refresh rate monitors. Those are some of the features I'm most interested in, since I use multi monitors.

Wayland is just very slow going with development as so many Linux applications have come to depend on X11/Xorg.

As far as Windows 8.1 goes. HELL no. I hate that metro interface. I've never had any eyestrain issues with Win 10 when I have used it. I've really only used it recently to play games like Forza Horizon 4.

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