Thank you to this community for all the support through the years! We're spending a lot of our time on basic research and sensing, and we have a few small updates planned for f.lux, too. The main challenge as we learn more about the biology is to keep things simple enough--it's easy to make things complicated, and it's pretty hard (for me) to distill them to something that makes sense to most people.
Also, if you care about how your eyes and circadian system work, don't forget about all the light from outside your screen too.
Thanks for f.lux! I‘ve been using it for years, basically without ever touching it, it just runs in the background on every machine I use. Couldn‘t imagine living without it.
The biggest advantage of smart lights I've noticed (I have the Hue Color Ambiance) is the simulated sunrise. No matter what time you want to wake up, it'll gradually get light just before your alarm goes off. This makes a noticeable difference in how I feel if I have to wake up early for something.
10 years ago flux inspired me to start down this path as well.
All the lights in our house automatically lower their color temperature and brightness at sunset every 15 minutes from 5000k to 2700k and 100% to 10%. SmartThings and the community created Circadian Daylight Coordinator have made this pretty straight forward to accomplish.
I don't have data, but anecdotally I can say it makes an appreciable difference in overall comfort.
I got a pair of blue-blocking lenses that are much more aggressive than f.lux. Personal annecdata from my wife and I is that they are fantastic. I can feel my whole body relax when I put them on, and I can go straight to bed after using screens.
They work pretty much the same way, so I think there shouldn't be a difference in regard to computer screens. As for the surroundings—I toyed with cycling glasses for a bit, which for some reason had amber-yellow plastic, and personally I prefer to just have yellow ‘evening’ lights in the rooms.
With cycling glasses, I had more of relaxing effect due to them keeping moisture on my eyes, instead of it being burned away by the winter heating.
While it’s not strictly necessary anymore, because most OS’s have at least a basic feature that mimics flux built in now, I feel like we owe the devs a huge debt for forcing the conversation about the toll our ultra high brightness screens have on our sleep patterns and quality and our eyes.
Plus, it’s a great example of a really high quality piece of software developed with a lot of care and a huge long term commitment.
I still advocate for the use of f.lux itself. Not only does it support them continuing to lead the charge, but we are also at risk of OS makers reducing the functionality if we don’t keep them on their toes.
f.lux still lets me go to a lower colour temp than either Windows or OSX. I know I’m a niche audience, but it makes a difference to me and I don’t think I’ll get anywhere by shouting at the giant Wall of Apple to expand their range.
there's also some sort of associative positive placebo effect -- oh flux kicked in and it just makes us feel better somatically / prophylactically -- time to relax, deep breath, not stressing about or late night coding or life or whatever
Yes. I do the same thing with my LED houselights, making them yellow and then orange in the evening. When I set them to white temporarily and then forget to change them back I've noticed it seems to increase my alertness/delay drowsiness.
It's most likely just that I've conditioned myself, but in practice I don't really care about the cause. I only care that it helps me wind down in the evening.
If you use home assistant there are some addons that allow you to sync the temperature of your LED bulbs to how high the sun is at the moment in your location... it's pretty neat.
https://github.com/claytonjn/hass-circadian_lighting
Yep, I also do this. It's excellent. Whether it's conditioning, placebo, or an effect of the receptors in the eyes; I'll take it.
There's something that feels good about being in sync with the natural day/night cycle. Cool white in the morning, warmer more dim light at night. I also like the idea of having a "sunrise/sunset" wall for any room that doesn't have proper windows but I've never implemented it.
I've noticed (varying degrees of: thankfully very few people get migraines) the same effect with hundreds of co-workers and employees.
A few times for late shifts in various businesses I've convinced the execs to shut off the fluorescents and I cannot describe the wave of relaxation that hits almost everyone.
It's so much worse also with the combo of 60Hz monitors and 60Hz AC power.
my primary alertness / relax goto these days was wholly unplanned -- swapped out a morning nasal saline in lieu of flonase to eliminate yet another medication, and turns out it also boosts alertness / relaxes -- so now just do morning and night &/or if needed during day plus sinuses way more clear in morning
* is pure OTC saline -- not any of that other stuff people use for hangovers, etc.
This comment reminded me that when I used flux and I'd work late, I'd reach a point where I'd get _tired_ because the blue light was gone (and I had my flux settings cranked). I haven't felt the same way with Apple's Night Shift.
I like that it has a hotkey for toggling it off and on, as well as some automation features for toggling it off when certain apps are in use. It's nice that windows has built in Night Light but it turns all my screen recordings orange.
Use Twilight app on your Pixel. Note that thankfully you can also give it Assistive permissions so that it can redden the whole screen (otherwise it won't have permission to redden things like the status bar and notifications pulldown).
Still use it myself as well... I like it less warm than macOS's night mode, and since I'm a night owl I get to make f.lux start its color change later than sunset.
The problem with OS-provided facilities for this is that they often don't give you enough control. I still use f.lux on an Android phone that I rooted specifically for this purpose, because that's the only way I can get dark red on black text in Kindle (for night reading).
Twilight doesn't do the same thing. It, and all other screen filters on Android that do not require root, can only add color, not subtract it. Thus, it cannot make white text on black background into red text on black background - it can only make it into pink text on red background.
It's true, how often does a little tool like this get mimicked in every major OS? It's too bad the devs don't get a payout for that, but it's a pretty unique achievement.
I still recommend it on Mac because you can manually fill in your location. Mac OSX temporarily disables your WiFi in to figure out your location, which can cause stuttering in live streams. With Flux you can also switch the dark theme of Mac, so it completely replaces Mac implemention.
I wonder how Flux works in regions which reach 24 hours of sunlight or 24 hours of nighttime in certain seasons. Can you make reasonable (or meaningful) assumptions about sleeping hours in those conditions? The program seems to kick in around sunset. What if there is no sunset?
I appreciate how once installed I just don’t have to think about it at all. If I fly somewhere, it pops up and confirms where I am, but otherwise it simply works flawlessly and entirely in the background for years on end.
Over 10 years and the same. I literally cannot use computers or any device without a warm filter. The builtin "night lights" in OSes don't work as well and are wonky. Fantastic software.
On Mac, this redirects you to the Paypal link https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/justgetflux/10 with $10 prefilled but unable to edit. Change the integer param to donate the desired amount. (donated)
Hah, you just made me realise how many years I've been using it and recommending it as a life changing thing to everyone, every time i see a cool screen in the evening.
If you're using an external monitor, it's better to do it on the monitor itself rather than in software. When you do it on the monitor it applies everywhere, even when rebooting or using another OS. When I did it in software (redshift) I noticed it was causing my laptop to overheat.
Here's how I do it on Linux with a Dell U2720Q monitor.
sudo apt-get -yy install ddcutil # Install ddcutil on Ubuntu
sudo modprobe i2c_dev # Load required kernel module
# Night - Set brightness to 20% and color temperature to 3000K
sudo ddcutil setvcp 10 20
sudo ddcutil setvcp 1a 43
sudo ddcutil setvcp 18 69
sudo ddcutil setvcp 16 100
# Daytime - Set brightness to 50% and color temperature to 6500K
sudo ddcutil setvcp 10 50
sudo ddcutil setvcp 1a 100
sudo ddcutil setvcp 18 100
sudo ddcutil setvcp 16 100
I really wish there was a common (XDG?) interface for monitor brightness so that e.g. Plasma/KDE can hook into this with their sunrise/sunset settings.
Ditto for my laptop, the software approach is just a bit untenable when I do work with graphics or design especially because you need consistency in these cases.
Personally, I just hit the brightness down button on my keyboard a few times around 8pm. I think windows has this as a built in feature now, too? I'm curious to know what f.lux offers over this:
First thing I see is f.lux lets you configure the transition (speed/intensity) between day/night modes as well as color temperatures rather having an abstract "strength" setting.
One feature missing from the Windows solution, which flux has and it works tremendously, is an automatic trigger to disable the color/brightness change when a certain app is opened. Works beautifully when I'm up to do some Lightroom work.
I've used f.lux for years until I enabled dark mode at the OS level and in the apps settings for those that require it.
More importantly installed the Dark Reader extension (https://darkreader.org). This one is incredible: it's much nicer to browser the Web in dark mode than to make page reddish. I now enable Dark Reader at all time (day and night) and can't stand the screen of my coworkers (so dazzling).
Idem for my Android device.
The only app/webpage I don' apply dark mode/reader to is Google Maps. For now…
Does Dark Reader work good on HN for you? Because it's not for me.
Edit: I just remembered I've been using an extension called "Hacker News Enhancement Suite" to enhance the layout of HN, and after disabling it, Dark Reader worked so I think that extension was somehow interfering with Dark Reader.
That extension looks to be a complete restyle of HN, which is probably why it was not interacting well with Dark Reader. I don't know what features you're looking for in the extension, but there's another called Refine Hacker News which adds features but doesn't change the styling. It does work well with Dark Reader.
That, and for Safari on iOS I bought Noir. Works like a charm and cannot miss it. Noir and automatic reader mode is actually a pleasant way to browse the web (although I often disable reader mode because it gobbles up images etc.).
Haven't heard of it (new to iOS). Looks fine, although at home I have DNS ad blocking, and I'm not sure how the auto-clicking feature works. I wouldn't want to automatically accept all cookies; I always manually reject everything, and until now I thought that wasn't possible automatically (it's very heterogeneous).
I use the built-in darkmode settings in qutebrowser [1], which work surprisingly well for most websites, but certainly not perfect. My impression is that the implementation is mainly in Qt, or Qt Webengine, so the same functionality may be available in other browsers with the same engine. The documentation also mentions Chromium, so perhaps equivalent settings are available there. (That said, qutebrowser is great.)
Anyway, my vague understanding of what is does is that it inverts all colors on the wrong side of a user-configurable brightness threshold (e.g. backgrounds that are too bright are inverted, and text that is too dark is inverted). This can make website colorschemes quite different, but most of the websites I visit regularly are still still readable, and often still reasonably nice-looking, despite having inverted colors.
The relevant part of my config file looks like this:
# This requests the dark version of the website if it is available. Generally when this
# works, I guess brightness-based the color inversion doesn't happen.
c.colors.webpage.preferred_color_scheme = 'dark'
c.colors.webpage.darkmode.algorithm = 'lightness-cielab'
c.colors.webpage.darkmode.contrast = 0.0
c.colors.webpage.darkmode.enabled = True
c.colors.webpage.darkmode.grayscale.all = False
c.colors.webpage.darkmode.grayscale.images = 0.0
c.colors.webpage.darkmode.policy.images = 'smart'
c.colors.webpage.darkmode.policy.page = 'smart'
c.colors.webpage.darkmode.threshold.background = 128
c.colors.webpage.darkmode.threshold.text = 128
I haven't spent any time tweaking the threshold values, but maybe some tweaking would make it even better.
Any extension that injects JS on the page on arbitrary sites, is marked as having access to all data—because it does. But it's the only way that interface-modifying extensions can work, if you want them kick in automatically.
It'd be nice if there was a browser permission along the lines of "this extension adds a static asset to every page" or "this extension can _write_ but can not _read_ the page".
To add static CSS styles, you need to know the structure of the HTML in advance, which the extension doesn't. And to modify the DOM—even to add styles on it—you need to traverse it, i.e. read. Plus, the whole job of the extension is probably to figure out what styles are on the page already and how they can be fiddled into the darkness.
To redefine styling in CSS, you need to know the structure of the HTML for a specific site or page. If you don't know it, you need JS to poke in HTML, fiddle with the styles and hope that it works out alright.
Where Dark Reader is full-featured, mine is minimal. It adds a translucent tinted div overlay on every page, with mix-blend-mode:multiply to make the text come out a little sharper. No themes or querying page elements.
You can audit the code yourself if you want, it's only 58 lines of JS across 2 files:
To me dark mode makes eye strain worse. I much prefer a deep red tint on light mode than dark mode with no red. Also dark with red tint is quite difficult.
I feel like during the day most things are bright/cool with darkness as the contrast. Text on paper. Also as much as dark mode has become an option, it's impossible to go an entire day without experiencing a light theme and the switching of light to dark or dark to light for me is worse than whatever problems each theme has. Point being it's easier to only use light than only use dark.
Anyway dark mode without red tint isn't really helping with the blue light problem? Especially if the media you're looking at is mixed with e.g. images of daylight.
I really liked Dark Reader at first but over time I ran into too many edge cases and bad themes across the web where I felt like the time tweaking sites wasn't worth the effort any more. I had to turn it off for so many sites I eventually uninstalled it. Now I'll only use dark mode if the site natively supports it (more and more are lately), otherwise I'm not crazy about playing cat mouse game hacking dark mode into sites that don't support it.
Dark Reader has 4 different themes. The default one does the job maybe 80% of the time, but whenever I encounter a site that looks a little wonky, I just click through the other 3 themes and one of them usually works much better. Then, I save that as the default theme for the site.
Same here. I can't use the web without Dark Reader anymore. It's not like other dark mode extensions that just apply a generic "make everything this much darker" filter. It seems to take a lot more into account when it's rendering the page. It usually looks pretty nice. Almost like a native dark mode.
Sometimes it leaves black-on-dark for icons and such, but that's negligible, and definitely a good trade-off to my eyes being drained.
Side note: Maps is surprisingly good with Dark Reader!
Many MacOS users (and some Windows users) may not know this, but f.lux supports auto-adjusting the color/brightness of Hue bulbs [1], so that your home lights also match your screen.
I installed Hue bulbs in my home office for this reason, which keeps my lights at a nice energizing color during the day, then warms up during sunset (especially useful during the winter Standard time).
Unfortunately I’m not aware of similar support for MacOS at this time, but maybe others know of options there.
I used it a few years back, but for me the color temperatures never scaled right. I like my lights at 4500-5500K during the day, but it looks a little too warm on my monitor (f.lux defaults daylight to 6500K.) Maybe it's my lights/monitor, but I really wish I could set different curves, or at least different color temperature targets for my lights and monitor. f.lux didn't allow me to do that. It only gives options for "warmer" and "a lot warmer," which both look weird at night. I ultimately hacked something else together, but it was a little disappointing, because I really like f.lux.
The Home app now supports a dynamic color option by default which changes based on the sun / lighting in your condition. Seems to work- I think it showed up for me about a year ago or so, so it's pretty new.
You can use redshift[1] on linux, and there are a lot of cli tools that can be used to easily script color changes in hue lights and others via cron. It's not as integrated as f.lux, but reasonably easy to get working. There's also redshift-gtk to contorl redshift from the systray.
Been a f.lux user for (I want to say) more than a decade. No idea if it actually helps me wind down at night and sleep better, but:
1. When the screen color changes at sunset it's a subtle but powerful cue to know that the work day is coming to a close. And then if I'm on my computer when it changes around bedtime that's a cue to GTF off the computer.
2. All the science I've read suggests removing blue light in the evenings does indeed help with sleep. So why not use it?
> powerful cue to know that the work day is coming to a close
Unfortunately in northern latitudes, our sunset can be as early as 3PM or as late as 10PM, so it doesn't quite work for that purpose here!
Nevertheless, I find matching the colour temperature with the time of day makes my eyes far more comfortable.
The studies on whether blue light messes with sleep are mixed, but I personally find if I set my lights brighter and bluer in the morning that I feel more awake than I do otherwise.
> Unfortunately in northern latitudes, our sunset can be as early as 3PM or as late as 10PM, so it doesn't quite work for that purpose here!
Yeah, that makes it totally unusable for me, it's ridiculous that they don't let the user set the hours and insist that you must follow the sun, because that's "more natural". Even though that might be true, it's totally impractical, you can't organise your work day after the sun, that's totally incompatible with the rest of society. At least os x night shift let's you set the time like the responsible adult that you are..
I changed the location in f.lux to somewhere south-west of where I am. Yes it gets dark at 3pm in Sweden in winter. That doesn't mean it's anywhere near bedtime.
I've used redshift since ever but didn't knew f.lux had a Linux version. Though nowadays GNOME and Plasma offer built-in functionality for this, it is still needed for those of us preferring a window manager (and gammastep for Wayland users).
Flux and the various other approaches are a fine way to re-grade the colors of a monitor to be more comfortable. By which I mean, if someone likes to use f.lux in the evening, they find the result more subjectively comfortable or pleasing, it's a great app.
I encourage people who are looking to solve sleep problems to not use any backlit screens in the several hours before sleeping. Such evidence as there is on the subject doesn't suggest that redshifting the screen is sufficient.
If you've seen someone using a laptop or phone in a dark room, it's quite clear that they're blasting themselves with a flashlight. Filtering some of the blue out isn't going to repair this basic dynamic.
Yeah, I’ve always found the assumption that f.lux actually redshifted the screen the same way their cited experiments did to be on shaky ground.
I don’t recall seeing any studies that directly used f.lux, just studies with blue lightboxes, and that stuck out to me as odd.
Monitors, even modern ones, don’t 100% convert their backlights (which are white) to the displayed color, so you always have an amount of washout, and I was always curious if that spoiled the effect, among other unique quirks of computer monitors.
KDE Plasma has included a builtin feature very similar to f.lux/redshift for a while, which works fine on Wayland. I've been using it constantly for the last 2, 3 years (I think?) and it does its job all right.
The toll on "sleep quality" has been debunked [1]. The original research only found ANY connection between screen usage in the evening and sleep in Teens. And no separate connection to Blue light or any other colour...
That is one interesting study in mice, but it goes against many in humans, so I wouldn't use the word "debunked" in this situation. Previous comments are here:
I mean, the same can be said about your comment. You’re strongly interpreting the results the other way (ie by trying to discredit them implicitly).
The current study has has not found links between cool light at night and sleep patterns. That may change in the future, sure, but current science suggests said theory is debunked (and I’m not afraid to use that word).
To be pedantic, I think the issue is more with the word itself. "Debunk" implies "expose the falseness or hollowness of (a myth, idea, or belief)" which is too strong when it comes to a study, especially when it doesn't itself claim to "debunk" anything.
Maybe we could say the theory is "weakened" by the new evidence or that it is now more "controversial" than it was before. "Debunk" sounds like blue light having an impact or circadian rhythm is some random "fake news" that could be found on Facebook, when it is still backed by some decent evidence.
Debunked or not I personally haven't seen it make a difference in sleep. But it DOES make these screens much more pleasant to the eye in dusk/evening hours. I'm a fan.
I have not added my own views on the subject, but merely highlighted existing words that seem to have been overlooked by some who have only read the news briefs and not the full study itself.
From the conclusion: "An especially pertinent question, however, is whether the effects of color described here extend to other mammals, such as humans."
The word "debunk" does not appear on any of the 13 pages of text.
> The word "debunk" does not appear on any of the 13 pages of text.
Who said the word appeared in the text? Who said the word has to appear in the text for it to be used in discussions among people?
> I have not added my own views on the subject, but merely highlighted existing words that seem to have been overlooked by some who have only read the news briefs and not the full study itself.
The words were not emphasized in the paper itself. You chose to explicitly point out certain things in order to discredit the comment you were replying to. You know exactly how your comment comes off, and by doing it you, indeed, add your own views to the subject.
"An especially pertinent question, however, is whether the effects of color described here extend to other mammals, such as humans."
=\=
"The effects of color described here extend to other mammals, such as humans."
The first is in the text. The second is an interpretation of the text.
Dismissing the content of a scientific article and replacing the existing words to support your own interpretation of the text is exactly adding your own views on the subject.
This study is but one step in the scientific process towards verifying this fact. Hopefully, the next step is taken soon and the theory is tested on humans.
Should that next paper conclude with "Blue light is not disruptive to human sleep patterns", then I would absolutely agree that debunking has been had.
In fact, since you are pushing to know my own views, I would be thrilled about it. Issues with sleep quality is something that affects me and having a concrete answer about the subject at hand would allow me to make better and more enlightened choices about steps to improve my sleep quality.
But this is not the case here, right now this would be selling the skin before having caught the bear.
Is this a good moment to slow down, analyse and ponder? Absolutely. Do test out if f.lux actually has an effect on you if you are a daily user. Do try to use another color than red in your Philips Hue sleep routine. But now is not the time to take direct actions.
...
Let's step back for a minute and imagine we were talking about a study about medication.
Let's say that an animal study came out that concluded with "An especially pertinent question, however, is whether the toxicity of acetaminophen extend to other mammals, such as humans."
I would without a doubt leave a comment highlighting the content of the paper to show the commenter that no, an animal study should not be strongly interpreted as debunking the safety of acetaminophen in humans.
Would you also write: "You chose to explicitly point out certain things in order to discredit the comment you were replying to. You know exactly how your comment comes off, and by doing it you, indeed, add your own views to the subject" in that situation?
The point is this, the whole blue light business popped up because the people who were doing the studies forgot that amber dusks are fairly rare outside of cities/equator.
Those of us nearer the poles have long, blue evenings. Yes, in march and august we tend to have brilliant orange sunsets. However those are the exceptions, not the rule. If you look at the colour temperature from noon till actual dusk, you'll see that it increases as time goes on.
pinning screen colour on the quality of sleep is a fools errand. We do not look at a screen for it's colour we look at for its content. That content has a much great effect on our sleep than the screen brightness and colour temperature.
TLDR: twilight is blue, not orange. Colour temperature and sleep quality is not convincingly linked.
You do not have to be looking at a screen for its color for it to affect you, methinks. That said, there is huge business from it. Same with the common saying from optometrists to parents that you have to replace your glasses (lenses at the very least) every 1-2 years. It is bullshit. It actually makes your eyes worse because it makes it work harder. If you are at -4, and you would need -5 to see sharp, do NOT get that -5, you can train your eyes to see sharper, but regardless, by getting that -5, your vision will only continue worsening. You need glasses to see your screen? Try looking at it for an hour without it. You will actually see it a tiny bit better without glasses, and that is just after an hour! Your eyes might relax a bit too much as well so you might get diplopia when you look close (at your phone screen) after looking at your monitor without glasses. It is harmless though.
As for the warmer color temperature: I do use it. I prefer it warmer because it burns my eyes much less. Similarly I prefer the brightness of my phone's screen around 40%. I have lenses that "block" blue light (i.e. makes white look more yellow).
If you are a developer doing UI/UX and that sort of thing where color matters, then you probably want to disable f.lux, redshift, or whatever it is that you are using.
We could also get philosophical here and discuss qualia. Is my red your red? :)
Ah so it is about the brightness of the screen and not the warmth? For some reason, warm colors also seem less brighter and harsh though - intuitively for me, I'd say Night shift/mode do work. YMMV
I know this is anecdotal but tools like f.lux made a huge different for me. I grew up with difficulties falling asleep and blue light filters like f.lux made an immediate impact on my ability to fall asleep on time. I was no longer in my teens at the time so that may be a factor
Which is weird because it would seem quite reasonable to assume that removing something that very likely negatively affected health would also improve sleep.
Stop eating junk food before bed? Probably better sleep. Stop getting poked with a stick before bed? Probably better sleep. Etc.
Besides turning my screen more amber at night, the main feature I use f.lux for is matching my ambient office light. I downloaded an app that measures color temperature and took a picture of a white piece of paper with my phone. My particular ambient light temperature is 4200K because of the fluorescent lights they use in my office. I set my monitor to match that, and it has helped my eyestrain and headaches considerably. The other thing I did to eliminate eyestrain was to get a pair of +1.00 reading glasses, because my eyes are just starting to get a little blurry.
Thank you for mentioning this! I've been experiencing eyestrain and eye pain far more than usual lately and was wondering if there was anything out there I could use to help me figure out what was going on, or at least adapt, beyond glasses (which I now have). I didn't know flux could do this, so thank you!
I believe that it is the intensity rather than the colour temperature of light that keeps you awake at night. The reason that red shifting the light works is that our eyes are more sensitive to the greener part of the spectrum (shifting towards red) and therefore you need a lot more blue light to see the same detail as you would for green or red light.
If you have an e-reader that only emits bluish light like a kindle paperwhite then you can turn down the light intensity and increase the font size to compensate for lost of detail sensitivity.
Just curious, do anyone not use this or similar functionality nowadays (in tech)?
I use them on my phone (which is the default and I didn't bother to change), but never get used to them on computer screens. I'm pretty sure if I give it more time I can quickly get used to, but just didn't see the appeal enough. I do have a yellow light in my room.
But then again I don't use dark mode either, so maybe I'm just a weirdo.
I don't use them on any devices.
I don't ever want to look at my screen through a filter, or have colors distorted, any more than is unavoidable.
If my eyes need a break, I'll take an actual break from the screen, rather than look at something distorted.
I also only use daylight bulbs in my house. "Soft white"/yellow bulbs give things a creepy feeling for me.
I don't use it at all. I sit in front of my computer monitor a minimum of 12 hours/day and don't have any problems with eye strain or sleeping.
I wonder if the people that like f.lux are also the same people that claim that light themes are blinding, because I'm of the opinion that if you find a completely white screen is blinding, then either your brightness is too high or you don't have enough ambient light in the room.
Same here. I used f.lux for a while, but the screen always got too dark/too reddish (on all but the lowest settings), straining my eyes and hurting my concentration.
In my experience it‘s sufficient to adjust the display brightness to roughly match the ambient lighting; no need for blue-light filtering.
I'm sure it was a mix of things (stress etc) but in 2013, I was regularly working late and my eye started to twitch. I remember downloading f.lux and a lot of eye strain and the eye twitch going away in a few days. Who knows if blue light was the culprit, but I've enjoyed f.lux ever since
I've used flux, or something like it for at least 10 years (these days, most operating systems have this feature built-in and don't require a 3rd party app). My eyes and brain rather like it, though I did have a friend visit me recently and he instantly commented "why is your screen so red?". I was surprised that the change of color was that noticeable to the un-accustomed eye.
A quick specific complaint (in hopes of learning about workarounds): The implementation on Windows (known as "Night light") seems particularly bad: Sometimes it won't turn on at the expected time, or sometimes it will only apply on 1 monitor but not the other. Has anyone else seen this? Any hints to make it more reliable?
Yeah, the Windows implementation is annoyingly buggy. I've found the best way to force it on (or off) without going into the settings and toggling it again is to kill explorer.exe via Task Manager - when it restarts then the night light will apply properly again.
I have my suspicions the reason why it doesn't work consistently has something to do with power savings or hardware profiles or something, but i haven't been able to reproduce it consistently enough to open a bug report.
I used f.lux (well, mostly redshift) for a while. After reading some doubts about blue light being particularly harmful I switched to only dimming brightness and found that I can dim more without shifting colors and I prefer that to shifting colors (partly because I have a non-24 hour circadian rhythm and am often awake at night, so I would often mostly see the shifted colors). So I would recommend giving that a try before shifting colors or try both ways and see what works best for you.
Redshift can easily just change brightness but f.lux doesn't have an option to just shift brightness last I checked and I haven't found a great way to do this on windows desktop (laptops have more built in brightness options that are at least easy to adjust). It sounds like some monitors have fairly easily adjusted brightness but mine is a pain to adjust anything. I tried redshift on windows but it had some issues that I don't remember. Since I just use windows for games, it isn't as big of a deal since games tend to be less bright (and many have brightness adjustment). As my monitor gets older I have more of the opposite issue of it not being bright enough during the day in the summer.
Also, I tried gammastep with sway, but it seemed to shift at the wrong time like there is a GMT vs local time mixup. I ended up just switching back to X.
I’ve used computers for years without f.lux and haven’t noticed any eye strain symptoms or sleep issues. I also got some blue blocking coating for my eye glasses last time because it was on a big discount and can’t tell the difference (symptom-wise… I can see the included blue laser is mostly stopped and things look slightly yellower) compared to my old glasses.
Just a note to avoid confusion: Lunar serves a completely different purpose than f.lux.
f.lux changes the colour temperature by altering the Gamma tables.
Lunar's main function is controlling the hardware brightness/contrast/volume/input/colors of external monitors using DDC and private macOS methods.
macOS also has a native approach to f.lux called Night Shift. I use it with Shifty (https://shifty.natethompson.io) to get the same featureset as f.lux.
I used to be a big fan of f.lux, then I just stopped using it and never felt the need to go back. My eyes never got any more sore and my sleep didn't suffer.
I started to wonder how much of it was the placebo effect, the initial change is certainly noticeable but the benefits are hard to actually quantify for yourself.
I think there is some placebo effect to it. I often see people saying "use f.lux for a while, then try to disable it to see how blinding your normal screen used to be"... but that's because it changes suddenly. If you enable f.lux suddenly without a smooth transition then the screen also looks reddish and weird.
I’ve been using flux and the like for a few years now roughly. Personally, I’ve never had a problem with eye strain/ fatigue, or falling asleep. I just figured ‘Why not? It can’t hurt.” I often wonder though is it really having any effect? I can’t tell any perceivable difference. I know many others claim otherwise, but that’s just my experience.
The science is not really clear, it’s definitely controversial. Truthfully, I suspect the amount of blue light from our screens is actually much more negligible that we tend to estimate. Unpopular opinion alert, but I don’t think filtering blue light at the screen level, or those glasses they sell really does much of anything. I think it’s more likely the placebo effect is in play here.
If I remember correctly, f.lux had an iOS app but they got removed from the store just prior to Apple announcing their own support for the same feature.
They do have an Android app as well as desktop apps. f.lux has been in the space for years and years now.
flux had an iOS app, but it was always side-loading through Xcode (or for jailbroken) but never on the actual iOS App Store. They need to use private APIs so it was never authorized in the first place.
If I recall correctly, they started with doing a screen overlay, and migrated to using the hardware gamma tables (I think I might have pointed them to it?). Android apps that do screen dimming use overlays, which ends up causing flickering.
All the operating systems tried to copy flux, but they can't get it right. On mac with night shift, the colors are never warm enough. On windows with night light they tried progressive reddening but it happens over a matter of minutes rather than hours and isn't configurable. Also it's buggy with turning off.
Flux has been resilient in being featureful through the years and has survived being obviated by operating systems including its basic functionality.
Sadly, it can't survive the transition to Wayland, given that applying filters on the entire screen is something only the compositor can do and thus it must be handled at that level and not in a separate app, like f.lux did on X11.
On Windows 10, I use flux instead of the built in night light. flux gradually increases the strength of the night light over time, which I prefer to the fixed intensity of the Windows 10 night light.
Using night mode on PCs greatly reduced the eye strain and sleeping issues I was experiencing due to long days at the computer.
I used to use f.lux but it had such poor configurability. Is it better now? I switched to SunsetScreen a while back which worked much better, but then eventually started using the built-in Windows blue light filter even though it is less powerful than SunsetScreen simply because it's less hassle.
If you're on macOS I would also recommend Black Light [https://michelf.ca/projects/black-light/] which lets you add all kinds of color filters to individual (or all) screens.
I always found ridiculous what it does to colors, to the point I always ask folks to turn it off when they try to show me their screen.
My monitor has "paper" mode, which removes a lot of blue and makes the picture greenish - something I found way more pleasing than f.lux redness.
I use this feature on my phone to let me know that it's too late to browse and I should go to sleep. Seeing this post on HN i realized i don't notice it turning on anymore for months, I doubt it's doing anything if all your apps support dark mode.
I've used f.lux for more than 12 years now. My preference is 3700K after sunset, and 2600K during the last few hours before bedtime - rather warm color temperatures - and it has definitely improved my ability to wind down before bedtime.
I was a happy f.lux user for several years and suddenly had a new (Xubuntu) machine which seemed to override it's settings. Redshift is "built-in" to Xubuntu and I find it to be equivalent for my needs.
My previous monitor, even at minimum brightness with flux enabled, was still uncomfortable to view at night. I finally invested in a monitor with low minimum brightness (~0.5 nits) and couldn't be happier.
I remember I tried Red Moon but it must have had some issue (either bright installation, or bright status bar or something else) because I end yp using "Screen Dimmer (dims notifications too)" from etsang, which is also open source and can recommend, works fine, everything dark plus has very good notificationto easily in steps brighten/darker your screen without going somewhere deep in settings
I remember there was some widely popular screen dimmer, which didn't even let you manually change setting and relied on location provided by google services which I don't have, not sure if it's not f.lux because it ws one of the most famous options
never used, tried to make it working on Android, but had some issues, was satisfied for years with Darker (Screen Filter) from mlhgdevelopment before I swtiched to Screen Dimmer (dims notifications too) from etsang which I use to these days
It works better than f.lux for me, because it works at a lower level than Gamma table manipulation. I’ve been using Night Shift ever since it was released and I like its color rendering more than f.lux.
But it’s subjective, some people like the extreme warmth of f.lux more. It depends on how you perceive colors and how well you can adjust to warmer colors.
Also, if you care about how your eyes and circadian system work, don't forget about all the light from outside your screen too.