Personally, I don’t even notice the difference. But a lot of people claim that fluorescent light bothers them.
How? I mean, in what way?
Bonus question;
Why are “sodium-vapor” lights so popular with fiction writers?
“In the putrid yellow glow…”
Yellow area lighting is almost extinct around here. It doesn’t work well with video surveillance. In fact, the Patriot Act will likely outlaw yellow light.
Peace,
mangeorge
Flourescents flicker. It’s annoying to see multiple strobed images of your fingers every time you move your hand. Plus, God intended light to come from point sources, not great bloody glowing tubes that annihilate shadows and reduce contrast. Then there’s the whole color thing. Don’t even get me started on that. 
I think its more the color thing. Flourescent light’s color ‘temperature’ makes them a more sickly green & blue while incandescent bulb’s are more a warm orange & red.
However, I also think that both flourescent’s flicker & color aspects have been improved in recent years.
Flicker?
A conference room where I work has a sophisticated dimmer system, which delivers flicker-free DC voltage to incandescent lamps behind a panel in the ceiling. Some people complain about the “fluorescents” in that room. I no longer work in the department that maintains that stuff, but once we took off the cover so you could see the lamps, and the complaints stopped. 
Modern solid-state ballasts and tubes don’t flicker.
Someone else can go on about color rendition.
People who suffer from migraines are often light sensitive (so much so that some poor souls can actually have a one triggered by light (strobe lighting is perhaps the main culprit, but glare off of cars is pretty effective for my mom)), and the flickering can sometimes be very pronounced as the bulbs nears the end of its life. I have had to leave rooms because of it. And if I am suffering from a migraine, they can make me nauseous.
[sub]and they BUZZ! shudder[/sub]
Write your representative. Get a law passed requiring modern fluorescent lights. OSHA, maybe.
I can see strobe-effect in front of my monitor, but nowhere else.
Flicker perception varies a lot from person to person and time to time. The old incandescent system they used to have in the NY subways (25 Hz) used to drive me nuts. It did the job, but wasn’t what I would have preferred.
The people complaining about the lights in your conference room were probably put off by a odd color temperature from the exotic light set up, and attributed the problem to the most likely culprit. They were wrong.
With nice new bulbs, and a decent power system, flourescents are good for a lot of purposes. But unlike incandescents, flickers and flares increase as the tubes age. These can be annoying.
I use flourescents in the shop. They put out a lot of light for the power. It’s just not quite the same quality as a decent incandescent fixture.
Total savings for fluorescents over incandescents is still on the order of 30- 40%. Few companies are going to forgoe that kind of money for comfort. None that I own stock in, I hope.
BTW, I think writers are impressed by the technical sound of the term “Sodium vapor.” It makes them think they sound all erudite and knowledgeable. This inflates their egos and allows them to fight off writer’s block more easily. No doubt, if you assembled a collection of references to street -lighting from stories that had never been finished, you would see a dearth of sodium vapor lamps.
From here;
And you’re complaining?
Some reseach was done a couple of years ago (I apologize profusely, for I don’t remember where I read it) on the effects of fluorescent lights on work efficiency. The flickering is indeed the key. Lights with a much higher cycle rate (1500 cycles per second, I think,) were perceived as constant, and weren’t irritating.
Even if further research bears that out, it’s unlikely that many managers will opt for more expensive lighting for the comfort of the workers. The whole point of fluorescents is reduced expense.