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Comment by taneq | Hacker News Reader

Hijacking this for a moment to say thanks for f.lux :) I've been running it for years and it's one of those things where you don't really notice the effect until you turn it off and then EGADS MY EYES.

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Windows 10 has this built-in, so does macOS.

I wonder from whom they took the idea? f.lux has been around for YEARS (2009)

These are relatively new features, and they arguably wouldn't have been added if not for the popularity of flux ;)

Does that matter? It's built-in now, and that's why I commented. To raise awareness. If built-in features have you covered there is no point going third-party.

It's nice that they are there for people who won't install 3rd party software to get the extra features, but f.lux is still better.

I understand where you're coming from but they don't have feature parity. Flux allows me to target much lower color temperatures than MacOS' built in "Night Shift" feature. That alone makes Flux worthwhile.

out of curiosity, how low are you going in terms of temperature?

Does it take a long time to get used to that? For me, Night Shift at full warm makes some websites difficult to use due to the change in color. I can't imagine going even warmer.

I would argue that if some software is under a free (libre) license, it's worth using over [non-free] first party stuff. This doesn't apply to f.lux, but does to redshift.

I assume you mean the night light button in the action center?

If so I would argue f.lux does a lot more. For one thing you can choose the hue it goes to, but also unlike the Windows 10 one which (AFAIK) is simply on/off, f.lux will adjust based on a schedule which means that you don't typically notice the effects (as the change happens slowly). This, combined with the ability to change damn near every parameter it uses, makes f.lux significantly better.

Edit: apparently windows does have hue adjustment and sunset/sunrise activation/deactivation available. TIL.

Both macOS and Windows 10 has on/off now, scheduling, less/more warm adjustment. Windows 10 even has sunset to sunrise based on location.

EDIT: HN is becoming more like Reddit every day, I see. Ridiculous. Down-voted for pointing out the existence of helpful features. EDIT: might have been my fault.

I know these features exist in some places. But nobody had it before f.lux. And it's still - imo - one of the best implementations.

f.lux screwed up how my MBP displayed graphics so I'm just using the built-in tool now. Unfortunate.

IIRC that's a bug in the Intel graphics driver or something. I ran into that in the past as well and it's not directly f.lux's fault.

Probably you were down-voted because of you starting with "What you are saying is wrong." People probably didn't like your tone and the original comment was only somewhat inaccurate. There still are more features in f.lux than the built in options.

And I assume you understand that since you edited that line out.

Correct. I realized that opening line set the wrong tone and was unnecessary.

Night Shift on iOS and macOS also has a sunset-to-sunrise setting.

There was nothing wrong with your tone.

Just checked. Also Mac OSX has Sunset to Sunrise based on location.

You'll almost certainly get down-voted on HN for whining about being down-voted, and for comparing it to Reddit.

So does Fedora, courtesy of recent versions of GNOME with "Night Light" feature.

Ubuntu got that too with the switch to Gnome. Before that, I used the open source https://github.com/jonls/redshift

I've been a flux user for years, but sadly I had to switch to the Windows 10's version. Flux causes a 1 frame lag every 60 frames which was driving me crazy. Only fix was to put it into Safe Mode, but Flux is really janky in that mode; especially when alt tabbing. The Windows 10 version also has no lag while shift colors. It's a shame. I'd love to have kept supporting flux.

Our 2010 version polled once a second to get around a lot of bugs (Intel GPUs back then would forget their color settings on standby and lots of other things).

Since our update last year (v4) f.lux stopped doing this and does a lot of other tricks to reduce impact on framerates too.

Too bad neither f.lux nor the Windows 10 version properly support color profiles. f.lux has some support, but it sucks. And the Windows 10 version just outright has NONE. :\

I would argue that it is only because of f.lux(and it popularizing the blue=bad idea) that MS/Apple/Google put this ability in their products. The technical ability to do such a thing has existed for ...decades, but no one ever did it until after f.lux came out.

ChromeOS has this feature for chromebooks now as well under the experimental flags section in case those users miss f.lux too. You can go to chrome://flags and search for Night Light to enable. As others have mentioned, I would rather use f.lux but (and my memory is hazy on this) I think the f.lux creator said the ChromeOS folks were not providing something he needed to get it working right.

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