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Comment by mathw | Hacker News Reader

Very strange. Neither of my cats have ever paid the slightest bit of attention to the contents of any screen on any device I own. Yet I know people whose cats like to watch television, so there's some thing going on where some cats see screen images as significant and others don't. I should go looking for info on that!

In any case, I don't see how this is XFCE's problem. Just change the wallpaper.

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> I don't see how this is XFCE's problem. Just change the wallpaper.

While any user who notices they're affected by the issue can fix it on their own, this is only likely to happen after damage has already been inflicted. XFCE can help people preemptively by changing the default to something less likely to attract cats.

Cat eyes have a different refresh rate than human eyes. Some cats can see monitors just clearly enough to make out what's on the screen. Others see flicker. The color gamut is different too.

I can see this being a thing with CRTs (which basically 'flicker' constantly), but LCDs?

Some LCD displays use flicker to set backlight LED brightness.

Dang, TIL, I guess... but I don't see how that relates to the OPs hypothetis about cat vision. A phrase I never thought I'd be uttering here, or... anywhere, really.

Back in the day, if my cat was near my monitor (rare), I would move the mouse cursor around in front of him. He would see it, and maybe gently paw it, and move on within 20 seconds.

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