I wouldn't say white on black, more like grey and some other muted colors on black.
I remember making the switch from black on white. I was working a contract job with ungodly hours and my eyes were pretty much always red and irritated. I started to notice certain colors on the screen were particularly irritating so I started to fiddle with the color scheme and eventually ended up with the light on black scheme.
I tried it on Ubuntu and while it worked, it caused a lot of issue,it would cause the whole UI to go nuts, when i would close the screen (laptop) sometimes it would fuck up everything when i would re-open it, and also going 100% CPU randomly, making the computer useless.
At first i thought it was just Ubuntu not liking my graphic card, but as soon as i removed it everything went back to nomral.
f.lux is also great for short and dark winter days. I keep my day temperature around 4,400K and my night temperature around 3,400K in the winter (and substantially warmer during the summer).
Agreed-- not-quite-white on not-quite-black is much less fatiguing for me than pure white on pure black. The slightly lower contrast is quite pleasing, but still allows for good contrast with syntax highlighting.
(I use a variation on the Twilight scheme in Textmate, Eclipse, and Xcode)
I remember making the switch from black on white. I was working a contract job with ungodly hours and my eyes were pretty much always red and irritated. I started to notice certain colors on the screen were particularly irritating so I started to fiddle with the color scheme and eventually ended up with the light on black scheme.
It was astonishing how much it helped my eyes.