An optical receiver comprising an optical-to-electrical converter and a digital processor having one or more equalizer stages. The optical-to-electrical converter is configured to mix an optical input signal and an optical local-oscillator signal to generate a plurality of electrical digital measures of the optical input signal. The digital processor is configured to process the electrical digital measures to recover the data carried by the optical input signal. At least one of the equalizer stages is configured to perform signal-equalization processing in which the electrical digital measures and/or digital signals derived from the electrical digital measures are being treated as linear combinations of arbitrarily coupled signals, rather than one or more pairs of 90-degree phase-locked I and Q signals. The latter feature enables the digital processor to more-effectively mitigate the receiver-, link-, and/or transmitter-induced signal impairments because various orthogonality-degrading effects can be mitigated in a relatively straightforward manner.