E
eslu

  • Jul 26, 2023
  • Joined Jul 18, 2023
  • In Eye strain on a Linux laptop, but not on MacBook, Android phone, etc.

    You're right. It is different. I installed Windows 11 on a USB stick, and it looks like I still have eye strain. I think the degree might be a little less than Linux, but I'm not very sure about that. Since I read from here that dithering is an issue for many, I tried to disable it using ditherig, https://github.com/skawamoto0/ditherig

    However, it doesn't seem like it is correctly working on my laptop. Or at least I'm not noticing a lot of difference. But even before all of that, I am not sure if my laptop is actually using dithering. I read from the framework community forum that the display is 8-bit and Windows 11 says the color depth is 8-bit, so I guess it's not using dithering? I am not sure.

  • In Eye strain on a Linux laptop, but not on MacBook, Android phone, etc.

    Just to try out something quick, I installed Windows 11 on a VM. Fonts are more blurry but it doesn't look like it's giving me eye strain. I don't know if it's going to be different if I run Windows natively.

  • In Eye strain on a Linux laptop, but not on MacBook, Android phone, etc.

    I am very glad that I have found this website. I thought I was the only one, but there's a whole community!

    I am getting eye strain on a Linux laptop, and I'd like to see if I can get some help on it and possibly fix the problem.

    I have a Framework 13 laptop and I installed Linux (Fedora with GNOME). And whenever I use this laptop, I get eye strain pretty quickly.

    The strangest thing is that I have a MacBook Pro M1 14" and an Android phone (Pixel 6), and I don't get any kind of eye strain on these devices. In fact, I have never experienced any eye strain before with any devices. I tried to match the fonts and their sizes on Linux to my MacBook's as much as I could. My Android phone uses smaller font sizes and probably very different fonts.

    It's very difficult for me to exactly describe my eye strain, but when I read a webpage or any kind of text, it almost feels like the fonts are sparkly or glowing. Then I quickly feel that my eyes are getting very tired and I guess itchy might be a way to describe it, if it makes sense. This is especially bad on a white background. Darker backgrounds are better but not entirely.

    Here are the things I tried out.

    • GNOME night light: I used dconf to set the night light value to 5500, which helped a lot.
    • Display brightness: Reducing the brightness helped me a lot as well.
    • I read from somewhere that MacBook's font rendering includes grayscale antialiasing, no hinting, and stem darkening. Though I am not sure if that's correct, I tried them out anyway. I found that using subpixel antialiasing made my eye strain worse very quickly, and grayscale seemed better. Stem darkening, especially for autofitter, seemed to help as well. I didn't notice a lot of difference with no hinting.
    • I also tried different values for lcdfilter, e.g., lcdnone, lcdlight, etc. When I tried lcdnone, I felt that it changed font colors at the edges, so I didn't want to use it. When I tried lcdlight, I felt that my eye strain was worse. So I changed back to the default.

    Although some of the above things helped, I am still getting eye strain and I'd like to fix it. I wonder if anyone has similar problems here and if there's any solution.

    dev