Redshift – A better flux program for Linux (2014)
techblog.jeppson.org
techblog.jeppson.org
I've been using Redshift for years, and it didn't require creating a manual configuration file unless you wanted to override the default settings. By default, it would use the geoclue2 package to try to figure out your geolocation and automatically adjust the brightness depending on that.
Unfortunately, the geoclue2 package has been broken on Fedora for several releases (it triggers an SELinux alert), so I only recently had to create the redshift conf file to manually specify my GPS coordinates. Other than that, there's no need to override any of the other default settings.
Sums up the Linux experience perfectly.
"I'm a Windows/OSX user and want to switch to Linux is there an alternative to X app?
Yes but unfortunately, it is harder to configure, it is a command line only and it requires creating a manual configuration file."
That's when a lot of people just nope out.
https://www.gnome.org/news/2017/03/gnome-3-24-released/attac...
Linux did a big move since "command line only".
; Global settings for redshift
[redshift]
; Set the day and night screen temperatures
temp-day=5700
temp-night=3500
The level of challenge required to copy some text into a text file with the syntax
[section]
settingname=value
People are prone to overestimate the difficulty of anything without a gui in fact its often like this.
Incidentally there appear to be a number of different guis for example on kde you could use
https://phabricator.kde.org/source/plasma-redshift-control/
To see the how this looks see
https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/widgets-linux-plasma-applets/
This post sums of peoples misperception of linux perfectly.
The text configuration is so easy anyone could do it once in 2 minutes and not worry about it for the next 10 years. It actually has a gui in fact multiple guis for this particular app based on platform.
If I mangled it and removed punctuation it might fit in a tweet but this wouldn't be as illuminating as actually showing how simple the configuration format is or linking to an actual frontend so you could see how it looks.
We write posts longer than tweets because we care about care about communicating ideas of value.
Not to mention most things including red shift actually have a gui.
I know there's this theoretical 'end user' who likes to point and click, but honestly, I've never met them. People who don't like computers just don't do configuration - having a GUI or not is besides the point - other than the fact it makes the howto of configuration difficult to communicate and specific to every app.
This is clearly a foreign world to you. Which is fine, but please don't act like you and your peers are anywhere near the other 99% of computer users. This is EXACTLY what people talk about when a discussion comes up about developers creating things for themselves, and not their end users.
I don't expect everyone to edit their text configuration in vim but come on everyone can learn better than that.
Acting like complete computer illiteracy is fate is nonsense. There are fewer and fewer of the people that grew up completely before computers and virtually every job requires some computer use at this point.
I personally like that computers as they exist developed organically, and primarily reflect the culture and ideas of their programmers. Equally, I can see it's no fun at all if you're the kind of 'end-user' who really just wants microsoft word and the occasional video. My grandad can use IOS because it was designed explicitly for end-users - which shows that it's primarily a design problem, not a people problem.
With a gui interface you install fresh and configure to your liking each time. With a file you could switch out your entire os and not have to reconfigure your apps.
This is not very difficult if you have done it before, but there is steep learning curve before you can do it and quite different from “check a few boxes and click apply”. I personally prefer the config file way because it gives you way better control over your system (especially if a config file causes crashes due to a bug), it is way easier to backup and restore without guessing (program X uses 5 different paths for its gui files) and you can distribute changes easier and without the help of a specialized program.
But this sums up the Linux experience quite well IMO: there are many advantages to using Linux and once you have gasped the basics, everything is less scary. But the learning curve is quite steep especially if you have never done anything like it so not many people use it and therefore there are less Linux applications. Furthermore there is also more variety which means the way I know to do might not work for your Linux distro or the old server I’m ssh’ing into.
Or, since you started it with the GUI, you could just choose "quit" from the menu that appears when you click on it.
Maybe I'm unique but I never liked how F.lux on Windows made the transitions slow, and automagically based on what the sun is doing, which approximates but often does not quite align with the ambient light in a room, let alone pick up on my fickle personal preferences of just how orange-pink I like my monitor to be at any moment.
Edit to add: This method uses no config files. I just apt install redshift and use keyboard settings to bind shortcuts to commands `redshift -x`, `redshift -O5000`, `redshift -O4200`, etc.
redshift -O 4000
redshift -x
Easy enough to set a cronjob, if that's your thang, too.
[0]: https://forum.manjaro.org/t/making-redshift-play-better-with...
I'm happy just using KDE Plasma, XFCE and i3wm and not having to care about whatever Gnome is doing (except when changes to GTK affects the rest of the ecosystem, like their client side decorations which make Gnome apps look out of place).
Who said that? You can always decrease brightness on a Linux laptop since the first gnome, I myself have gnome3 installed on 2 laptops and the brightness buttons are working perfectly fine.
Redshift manages to decrease brightness even further.
[0]: https://github.com/graupe/brownout [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10575921
I have to relaunch redshift when I reboot. The GNOME setting just had to be set once.
Occasionally it has failed for some reason, at night, and I'm shocked by the blue light flooding my senses.
[1] https://github.com/swaywm/wlr-protocols/blob/master/unstable...
[2] https://github.com/minus7/redshift/tree/wayland
Works great on FreeBSD as well.
https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2018/06/28/freebsd-desktop-pa...
... and if Redshift seems too 'bloated' with too much dependencies there is OpenBSD style SCT - Set Color Temperature:
https://www.tedunangst.com/flak/post/sct-set-color-temperatu...
xrandr --output DVI-I-1 --gamma 1:1:0.5
The issue isn't brightness, it's the actual color of the light. The tl;dr version is "blue light definitely messes with your sleep cycle." There's a Wikipedia page about this, with several references at the bottom: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_blue_light_technolo... (And I'm sure a search in your favorite search engine will find even more information on this subject)
...and kills your eye cells.
https://www.tedunangst.com/flak/post/sct-set-color-temperatu...
Redshift works just fine on macOS. I've been using it and I like it more than f.lux because one can write scripts around it.
P.S. I am not sure what one's mileage might be in Linux without being able to access a terminal. That said I found redshift working out of the box, and there are various guis (see mentioned below). So the argument that it was harder to configure does not resonate with me really.
But yeah, like the other reply, I use Redshift slightly less blue in daytime and much less blue at night.
Do you or anyone else have a third setting for bedtime like f.lux has (say for 1 or 2 hours prior to bedtime)? If yes, how do you simulate this third setting and how do transition smoothly from the evening setting to the bedtime setting?
I don't have 3 different auto-settings. I would LIKE to do that though!! Is there a way to do that?
nice redshift -l <YOUR-LAT>:<YOUR-LON> -b 0.6 -t 5500:1900