R

ravipra

K-Moss , I tried to install Neon on 3 laptops. In all the three the installation (live) usb fails to boot. May be I will wait for the next version and give it a try then.

K-Moss , I tried it an year back or so, but either it was the same or worse. I will give it another shot. You seem to have good experience with it, right?

@degen,

The context is that a couple of years back I had switched from ManjaroKDE to Arch KDE in the name of building my own slimmer installation. However, when I tried Manjaro KDE a couple of weeks back, it seems better than Arch KDE. I learned several things on this during the past couple of weeks. This is all on spinning disk on a laptop. So, not sure how much mileage you would get out of this. But, thought we can compare notes. Here is what I have, for several of which I do not have metric oriented explanations:

Mnajaro KDE version: 20.2.1

1. Manjaro KDE is better than Arch KDE.
2. Manjaro KDE is better than Manjaro KDE Minimal.
3. While installing, Manjaro KDE "Open Source Drivers" option is better than "Proprietary Drivers" option.
4. Partitioning scheme has an impact on eye comfort. Having a single partition for everything is the worst option. Best option is to isolated largely read-only partitions from the other I/O types. For example, / is largely read-only, where as /home is typically read-write, and /var is largely write-only. So, minimally having separate partitions for /, /var, and /home would be good. Separating /boot also may be a good idea. Another variation is to have /var and /home to use the same partition and doing bind mount for /home. Using this separation, I am able to use Manjaro KDEcomfortably on what we would call a crappy (laptop) monitor!
5. If you are using ext4, it may take upto a couple of hours to do lazy initialization after formatting, where disk writes will be higher. Its better not to judge the display quality during this time.
6. The urge to turn-off sub-pixel rendering (SPR) means the installation is already under trouble. In my experience, SPR itself is not the problem, its the slowness of something that is giving the strain. I could easily tolerate SPR on Gentoo KDE (after tuning the USE flags a lot), and FreeBSD KDE (out of the box). The problem with these distributions is that its very difficult to get some things working, such as audio, zoom, slack. Its not impossible, but need to put in a lot of effort. Else, I would switch to FreeBSD KDE without a second thought!

Hope this helps.

@degen , unfortunately, I should say bad. In the past 6 years I have tried 4 monitors on my desktop and my personal rating from best to worst is: Dell P2214H > Benq BL2420PT > Benq GW2255 > Dell U2415. I have always come back to Dell P2214H after trying other 3 monitors. I do not remember being able to bear them for more than a couple of months.

Since the rest of the environment also has an impact, giving it here:
o Arch/Manjaro KDE Plasma
o DisplayPort if the monitor supports, else VGA

jrhack , My experience is that IPS is the best and after that probably TN and then VA.

magiks , I had the same experience when I was using Manjaro KDE. Manjaro has TLP package, which controls disk and other power saving features depending on whether its on battery or mains. I haven't noticed such difference when I use Arch KDE though. Arch does not install TLP package by default.

@devilgrove , Have any large files or a large number of small files came onto the hard disk lately? This could have an impact, accordingly to my experience.

Another example is removing the unrelated (non-english for me) locale files gives improvement for me. I use localepurge to achieve this. What;s on the file system does have an impact. May be file searching/loading slows down something, even if the files are in the cache!

KM . Right. Unsure why. That's the surprising part. The only dependency I know of is xorg-xrdb optionally depends on gcc.

K-Moss, I am not sure, really! I bought GW2255 after reading several reviews. One difference, though, is that it does not support displayport, so used VGA. The other 3 monitors (2 Dell and 1 BenQ) support displayport.

NightWolf149 , I also have a bad experience with GW2255. Within seconds I feel eye pinching sensation and some kind of numbness in the brain. I noticed this an year back as well as again a week back. In between, I tried a couple of Dells.

BL2420PT does not present such problems for me. Although its supposed to be flicker free and true 8-bit, I do not seem to have benefited by it, with respect to avoidance of strain.

I use KDE Plasma on Arch LInux.

murateroglu, its modesetting driver.

As suggested by https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Microcode I installed micro code updates package and it helps reducing the eye strain. I could feel that on both of my Lenovo laptops (i7-5500U and i5-7200U), running Arch Linux with KDE Plasma.
Prior to installing the package I used to get [Firmware Bug]: TSC_DEADLINE disabled due to Errata; please update microcode to version ... in dmesg output.
Thought it might be useful for some one.

HAL9000, Right. The hybrid/switchable graphics cards are another story, though. My point about faster memory and more powerful cpus is that: Typically memory bandwidth is a scare resource on a machine and both CPU and display controller compete for this resource. For higher end CPUs (i7) there is more cache, so their frequency of going to the main memory is lesser than the lower end CPUs (i3). Similarly, given everything else the same, faster memory should help with giving a better display.

HAL9000, If possible, please prefer a machine with i7 and fast RAM. Slower memory has a lot to do with eye strain. Since i7 typically has more cache than lower variants such as i5 it would also help.