I used to be on KDE. It had night color control integrated. Then I switched to XFCE, and it did not. So I installed Redshift.
Oops! Redshift requires location access so it can automatically set the color temperature based on the sun’s position in the sky. Now it doesn’t work when the network is deactivated. And on my system, I can’t set it to redden/bluen based on the time only.
I go to AlternativeTo, to find an alternative. It looks like all of them do the same thing, or are discontinued.
Is that what everyone wants? Is that all that’s out there? Just ““smart”” programs that access your location to automagically change the colors based on astronomical events?
Even on Windows you could set the night color control based on the time. Am I living in a backwards world where Linux uses the invasive complicated way and Windows uses the private simple way?
Is there a simple program out there that can set night color control with only the time, none of that other crap?
Yeah I’ve always entered my location manually for both redshift and gammastep (like redshift but for wayland) in a config file because these programs can never seem to auto-detect my location on any of the devices I’ve tried them on. You don’t have to use your real location. Just put yourself in the correct hemisphere and continent and it’ll probably be ok. If putting a location in the same approximate location as your country in a local text file is too much of a privacy concern to you, then so is setting your system’s local time to your real timezone.
I don’t have an alternative program to suggest, but there are some workarounds for using redshift.
First, in the config file, you can set the location provider to manual, then specify a lat/lon and it will use that location in its time calculations. I do this on my laptop, and it works well except for when I cross multiple timezones - things are obviously off a bit.
Second, with the caveat that I haven’t tried this, it looks like you can also manually set dawn/dusk times in the config, which sounds like what you’re after.
See man 1 redshift for more info.
