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I recently had an eye appointment, and the optometry student who saw me told me that, for my next pair of glasses, I should get lenses with "blue blocker" material. There is some (scant) evidence that blue light from computer monitors causes macular degeneration over time.

Prescription lenses with blue blocker look ugly, IMO, so I opted not to get the blue blocker in my lenses.

At the same time, I don't want to lose my eyesight if I can avoid it.

Are there software solutions available in Ubuntu for turning off or substantially reducing blue light emitted from my monitor -- at the particular wavelengths that have been shown to harm eyes?

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  • I just discovered that it isn't even necessary to install the gtk part of Redshift. Simply sudo apt-get install redshift and you can manually set not only the colour temperature, you can also alter the gamma. I've mentioned these here in a bit more detail: nrecursions.blogspot.com/2018/03/…
    – Nav
    Oct 15, 2019 at 18:31
  • I've suffered chronic eye strain since 2011, and visits to multiple ophthalmologists revealed that they don't have the slightest idea of how to cure eye strain or how to resolve CVS. They blurt out nonsense about lenses, eye drops, lens coatings etc. but they don't know that the ONLY cure is to get 8hr uninterrupted sleep, close eyes to take rest each hour and get a well balanced diet. This is how I cured myself.
    – Nav
    Feb 16, 2020 at 15:23
  • Here's an article about it. Jun 20, 2021 at 5:59

4 Answers 4

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You may achieve this without installing any extra application if you're using GNOME. Newer versions (> 3.24) of GNOME come with a feature called Night Light to be found under Settings > Displays.

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I have searched for the same and tried,

  1. iris mini - Works well but its not free and need to buy license to change any settings. Not available in default repositories
  2. f.lux - Just flickers sometimes and then goes back to normal color temperature after a while or may be I felt so. Didn't see too much of a difference. Not available in default repositories
  3. Redshift - It's the easiest to configure of all and I can notice a good difference in terms of color temperature and strain on eyes.

Was able to install with just

sudo apt-get install redshift redshift-gtk

Buy the way, I tried all the above on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

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  • 1
    I tried redshift on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and it works like a charm Nov 10, 2021 at 3:27
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I used f.lux on Windows, it is available for linux too, but it is not opensource so you won't find it in repository.

Redshift is opensource and you should be able to find it in repos.

There are others, but I didn't try them - G.lux, iris mini.

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  • Yes, it doesn't matter for what issue it was designed. You need to filter blue light. This software does it. But some software filters blue light only at night so make sure your software is able to filter all the time. I know f.lux can do this. Also I think you need to filter light only at night. But I did not study optometry. Blue light is around us all time - but not at night, so many of these filters are filtering only at night. So light from monitor will be more 'like natural'.
    – FK-VH
    Aug 3, 2017 at 16:03
  • of these, the one i like the best is iris mini. it seems to be more easily configurable to be on all the time than the others.
    – abcd
    Aug 3, 2017 at 17:07
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You can use software like redshift, but it does not have automated timezones and sun flowing capabilities. If you don't like it, you can try installing fluxgui.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nathan-renniewaldock/flux
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install fluxgui

(note I have only tried it once, and I give no guaranty of seamless use)

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