You probably already know that the screens from electronics give off a blue light that tricks our brains into thinking it’s broad daylight. This can interrupt sleep patterns and cause eye strain, which is definitely not good for your overall health. This is especially prominent in today’s work- and school-from-home life where we look at computer screens for eight hours a day. It’s good to have tools around to help change the color of monitors. There are many programs that will do that. This article will introduce you to one of them on Linux and show you how to configure color temperature in GNOME Night Light.
Enabling GNOME Night Light
It’s really easy to enable GNOME Night Light. Find your GNOME Settings in the upper-right corner, then click on the “Displays” Icon. At the top of the window that pops up, click the sub-menu for Night Light.
To turn on Night Light, click the switch to on.
To set the schedule for Night Light, you have two options. First, you can click on “Sunset To Sunrise.” This option will use your computer’s clock to determine roughly when the sun rises and sets and enable Night Light during the span of time after the sun has set and before it rises the next day.
If you’d rather set the times manually, you can do that too. Just click on that button and use the two controllers below to adjust the times. Keep in mind that GNOME uses a 24-hour clock by default. To change that, go to the “Date and Time” section of the settings app and change “24-hour” to “AM / PM.”
Adjusting Color Temperatures in GNOME Night Light
You can manually set the “temperature” of the color that GNOME Night Light sets your monitor to. If you’ve ever used an LED light bulb, you should be familiar with the concept of color temperatures. Lower number temperatures are generally warmer and redder in color. Higher temperatures are in the blue/white spectrum. The goal here is to move the monitor to a lower, redder temperature.
To do that, all you have to do is move the little slider at the bottom of the screen. Unfortunately, it’s tough to show you the difference in the colors, as it doesn’t actually change the color of the pixels – just alters the warmth of the colors. Included here are some images I took of the screen on my phone. They’re not great quality but help illustrate just how much you can control the color settings.
From my preference, the warmest setting is far too warm. I like mine somewhere around the settings in the next image.
You should experiment with different warmth levels in your most-used applications and see what looks the most normal. On apps that are primarily white, you may be more sensitive to the warmth of the light, as it may make your apps look downright orange. However, you can go warmer when you have apps that are darker in color without compromising the experience.
If you enjoyed this article, make sure to check out some of our other GNOME content, including our GNOME Shell review, how to work with workspaces in GNOME, and how to change icons in GNOME 3.
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