• AbstractOS

  • Eyestrain when switching from Windows to Linux

diop Intel has a large prescence on Social Media, and the graphics driver team are around. I have recently reached out to a member from Intel with my concern's re: dithering/being unable to use my NUC. I didn't want to flood /r/Intel so sent PM's - and got a response.

Hi - thanks so much for reaching out to me about ledstrain.org. I'm sorry to hear about your eyestrain issue, and hope you can find a solution. I'm currently on medical leave, so unfortunately I can't do any work right now. Please send the same message to X who is covering for me while I'm out; and he can connect with the right folks.

..and then a futher comment

P.S. And thank you personally for the link to that site. I'm off work due to visual issues which make it difficult for me to look at screens. Still in the diagnosis phase though.

The irony wasn't lost on me...

Sorry to jump back a little here @diop but this person could potentially play a pivotal part in helping us if they happen to be experiencing the issues that we are experiencing, and also work in the Intel graphics department (or can link us directly into them). Did you manage to maintain contact with them by chance?

  • diop replied to this.

      si_edgey Sorry to jump back a little here @diop but this person could potentially play a pivotal part in helping us if they happen to be experiencing the issues that we are experiencing, and also work in the Intel graphics department (or can link us directly into them). Did you manage to maintain contact with them by chance?

      You'll find they both post many of the Intel announcements over on reddit and host the Q&A sessions. I don't know their direct affiliations with Intel however I am led to believe they either work closely with the driver dev team or pass feedback to them.

        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)

            5 months later

            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.

              12 days later

              Alright, apparently what Wallboy says is TRUE. Sooner than T60p, I got this T43 15" (1440x1050 FlexView/IPS ?) with ATI Mobility X300 and have been testing it under older linux distro (opensuse 11.2) using free radeon driver. No eyestrain. For the first time in my life there was NO eyestrain under linux + LCD display. I'm pretty sure it's nothing to do with thinkpad display IPS or not. I was also thinking of trying out proprietary driver too, but I don't really want to break this system as 'fglrx' is known to cause more issues than any free linux driver ever did. With Ndivia is the other way around, though.

              So, now that we are really getting somewhere, perhaps, a few more people should join the experiment and play with their old hardware.

                Pudentane It's good to have at least one good old system that works well, but I feel older hardware is not the answer when a lot of modern software that people need for work just won't run on it. There is always new stuff coming down the pike, in 2021 we will see microled displays finally, etc. The T43 is a fine machine, but it's also a single-core 32 bit cpu.

                    Sunspark but it's also a single-core 32 bit cpu.

                    I know someone who had one of the first 64-bit dual core laptops in 2006. 🙂

                      Sunspark Oh, but I'm not saying we should all go back to ancient machines. T43 as well as all T's from 40 to 60 is just a little vintage passion of mine, which I also took advantage of to kindly provide this input. Obviously, I like to think it was somewhat useful. At least now we can tell them "But it's not present on older GPUs!". It's definitely something as opposed to complete ignorance we were facing earlier. Now the million dollar question is: what exactly went wrong and when?

                        8 days later

                        I facing the same problem here! I used to think the problem was only mine. Thanks God i found this forum. I will try disabling dithering.

                          5 days later

                          ggp110 not going to help i'm afraid. At least it never helped me nor too many people in here. Some claim they just can't disable it, though I found no issues doing that, just that it doesn't fix the eye-strain at all. The truth is, you can't really do anything about it. We have tried everything and all we have concluded so far is that a) It's non-existent on certain legacy GPUs and b) It seems to be absent if using very basic video drivers like VESA, since they don't harness the full potential of your GPU and therefore the problem is not triggered. What we could do is an in-depth research and report it to AMD, Nvidia and Linux devs in every minute detail and perhaps they could finally do something about it. I don't think we can fix it ourselves, it's just too delicate.

                            Hey there. I am glad to find other people with the same issue. As I am a developer I usually sit about 10 hours a day in front of my screen and the most important thing for me is: NO EYESTRAIN.
                            For my work I have to use a Windows 10 Machine with no issues. Privately I switched to linux but just can't use it for longer than 10 minutes which makes it useless for me even though I'd loved to use it.
                            I have read all posts here and can confirm everything. I also fiddled around with the mentioned settings with no luck so far. I will try to reach out the issue to the askNoah show. I am sure he will try its best to help because he supports people who are switching from Windows to Linux.

                              jowCode For my work I have to use a Windows 10 Machine with no issues. Privately I switched to linux but just can't use it for longer than 10 minutes which makes it useless for me even though I'd loved to use it.

                              Just to clarify - are you booting Linux on the same hardware that Windows 10 runs on without issue?

                                Recently my Lenovo z500 died a nvidia related death so I replaced the motherboard with an ebay one, it doesnt have an nvidia chip on it now, I swapped the same CPU over and installed Ubuntu 18.04 - was ok. Ubuntu 20.04 though? - NOT OK. Text looks fuzzy and it gives me some strain. Its better on 18.04 but that goes out of support soon. I also tried Kubuntu but this is similar.

                                I may try to put W10 on it but I dont think the hardware was ever supported as its quite old. (it had W8 on before the board swap) and this machine was fine for me to use with its built in and external screens on the HD4000 graphics. (but I would guess the external screens used the nvidia chip it had at the time - which it doesnt have now)

                                  HAL9000 you don't happen to be on freenode, do you? There is someone with a nickname just like yours on my channel

                                      7 days later
                                      16 days later

                                      Breaking news: some folks report an absolutely strainless distro, which is ROSA Linux. Anyone cares to test it out?

                                        Pudentane I am skeptical that any version is fine, but I do have a question since I was curious enough to look up this distro. The people reporting this, which version were they using? 11.1 uses the 5.4 kernel and 11 uses the 4.15 kernel.

                                            Pudentane Who are "some folks"?

                                            If a definite "good version" on a hardware setup is identified, should be able to isolate what's different with some work.

                                              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.

                                                  dev