Interesting. I've actually been making more use of light mode lately, even for code. Granted, I'm not that old yet but I'm almost 40, and I have astigmatism so dark mode was already difficult to read, but now I feel like its gotten much worse for me.
I lament the lack of good light theme choices though because the majority use dark mode, and dark mode is increasingly becoming the default setting which I don't particularly like, but as long as there's a choice its fine.
I don't do much work on a screen in the dark anymore though to where dark mode would be necessary. My home office is surrounded by big windows with a ton of natural light.
This. I hate dark mode because it’s difficult to read for me (myopia due to age) - the glowing letters on dark background get much blurrier for some reason.
Most people who like dark mode use it so they can be in a dimly lit room and not have the display blast their eyes with light but I’ve found that under low ambient light my vision is far blurrier - a well lit room complemented by light mode (ie natural, default) display is the easiest to read.
Back when I attempted to be an edgy college guy, I carried my Gentoo with green foreground on a black background. EVERYWHERE. My pcmanfm (yes, I was one of those) looked glorious in true matrix style (and I did have a matrix screensaver). I did it because it was "cool", not because I felt that dark mode was better.
Then when I changed to MacOS, since there wasn't native dark mode, I don't think I ever _thought_ of even changing it. Things just looked great and I had no complaints.
And, as I've aged, dark mode started to actually hurt my eyes.
There's a special kind of dark mode which I can never put my finger on and literally makes my head hurt. I can feel my light adjusting itself to the change and the blurriness settling in. Every letter seems to transfer some of its weight onto neighboring letters, even those in a previous paragraph with quite a large vertical gap! I don't see the letters overlap but it's like my mind is telling me that they ARE overlapping. It's bizarre but it's the best description I can give: my brain is convinced they overlap, even though my eyes disagree.
I can never focus on those websites and have to quit immediately. Usually pitch black is bad, but I've seen some websites make it work. I once read it has to do with astigmatism and ever since then I've paroted that, but I have friends with astigmatism who scoff at my white/light mode.
I'm a guy who loves to have the maximum brightness, and incredibly bright lights. I'm not kidding: if I work against a black wall I'll go crazy. Back at my parent's place I pointed 4 different strong ceiling lights at the place where I used to have the computer to make sure it was LIT.
It sort of sucks because there's an increasing amount of dark-mode only websites and I've had to occasionally apply custom styles to them just to browse...
Only some dark mode does this to me, and only on some screens. I find "light mode" bearable, but anything else cute like custom fonts or whatever and I am seeing 33 as 88 and 100 as loo.
I have schwas in my vision, like swishy halos around light sources. At one point I counted 12 distinct mirrored images. Driving was awful.
Reading my 4k screen was impossible, gave it to my wife and switched to a 2k HDR at 175%.
I still have swishes but only 1.5-2 and much dimmer. It used to be impossible to read the clock on my stove at night because it would just be a green smear!
It's funny how over saturated that green is on my phone's OLED screen vs my desktop's LCD. The green is retro on my desktop my very not retro on my phone. It is supposed to be a subdued retro green not the overly saturated color that mobile makes it out to be!
The blue comes across truest to my vision on both LCD and OLED displays.
I don't know how anybody can stand glossy screens, period. The mirror effect is wildly distracting. All my daily driver machines have matte screens. If I could get a matte screen on my phone I would.
Light mode has its place! I think I am far happier reading light mode text, but when I code I want dark mode. Dark for _everything_ is sometimes overwhelming, it always seems like there are too many things to look at.
I lament the lack of good light theme choices though because the majority use dark mode, and dark mode is increasingly becoming the default setting which I don't particularly like, but as long as there's a choice its fine.
I don't do much work on a screen in the dark anymore though to where dark mode would be necessary. My home office is surrounded by big windows with a ton of natural light.