(Likewise many people say they can't hear the noise ANC headphones produce - it seems likely to me that they're either in a too loud environment so it's masked at all times, have hearing damage or both. It'd be interesting to see the Venn diagram with people who complain you can't turn up phone headphones to be loud enough any more - mumble mumble the EU took it from us! Meanwhile the volume step size of AirPods is too coarse for me because I'm only ever using the lowest four or so "clicks", rarely exceeding 50 dB per HealthKit).
This leads to interesting things like for many a white noise source (actually pink noise) nicely blots out most other auditory stimuli by helping direct attention away. Yet the noise source itself heightens sensitivity (why some people find ANC annoying).
Finally some people simply can not direct their attention strongly and it's worsening.
Hypersensitivity it's being swallowed up as an autism trait but many people simply aren't as trained at directing attention than we were in the past since we have such loud hobbies.
Mindfulness does wonders here.
When PulseAudio added "absolute volume control" support, I found out it would sometimes fake in extra clicks in which the actual volume would NOT change, but gave the impression of granularity. Wonders of HDA & usb audio...
On my old QC-35 I couldn't hear it, but it's pretty noticeable on the QC-45 I got after those broke.
It's mostly due to the background noise such as active ventilation, air conditioning, other computers/servers/printers with fans etc in the office, which you might not have in your house.
The empty office might seem very quiet, but in terms background fan like noise it's not.
Traffic noise could also be a similar background noise factor.
Witness people who don't notice screen tearing in X11, or people who don't mind (or even prefer!) Windows font rendering.
A common video subsampling setup is 4:2:0.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chroma_subsampling
In addition, common video compression techniques (at least the simple ones that I could still understand) basically reconstruct blocks of pixels. Reconstruction is lossy, at best.
If I had to guess, something similar could be done in games as part of their optimizations.
For 83" TVs you obviously need more pixels to get a good viewing experience because you don't position yourself several meters in front of the screen to make the pixels unnoticable.
When the subpixels don't align, ClearType can be ugly as hell, but for me the default guesses always worked out.
The only time I had dislike for ClearType was when I'd rotate a monitor from landscape to portrait. This makes sense, since the subpixel layout is then wrong. So, I'd usually just redo the ClearType settings when rotated and use the monitor in that orientation for a while instead of constantly switching.
Alternatively, you may be getting the "RDP" experience for optimized drivers, which is just very blocky.
I prefer ClearType over whatever macOS does (or did, been a while since I had a Hackintosh) but combining different rendering styles is always jarring. Helping Mac people through remote desktop always made the text look wrong to me, probably for the same reason. When you expect text to look a certain way, alternative renderers are always wrong.
This is also something I notice with some custom GUI libraries that implement their own font rendering. I've dropped several GUI tools because I just got frustrated by how their text always looked different from normal text.
macOS and Linux rendering looking better to me regardless of render scale. Good kerning and no beating font glyphs into odd shapes to fit a pixel grid on screens with pixel density high enough that it isn’t necessary (we’re not running 1024x768 LCDs any more).
Also, font rendering has gotten worse under Linux in recent years (due to fractional scaling).
I should probably just switch to a BSD that doesn't include Wayland support before it is too late. That'd fix my desktop's incessant pulseaudio and systemd screwups too...
Most people are using a compositor that came with their DE, so screen tearing never happens.