Linux Mint is Adding a Native 'Night Light' Feature to Cinnamon - OMG! Ubuntu

Redshift replacement set for Linux Mint 22.1

Linux Mint has announced it’s adding a native Night Light feature to the Cinnamon desktop.

Earlier versions of Linux Mint included a third-party app called Redshift to provide similar ‘blue light’ filtering functionality.

However, when the Mozilla location service shut down earlier this year the geo-location capabilities powering Redshift (which allowed the feature to automatically start at sunset for a user’s location) stopped working.

Linux Mint’s developers felt asking its users to work-around the breakage by entering their location’s longitude and latitude coordinates manually in the app was a tough ask given its a distro focused on and famed for being user-friendly.

So on its arrival, Linux Mint 22 removed Redshift from the default install entirely (although the app remains available in the Linux Mint repos for users to install if they want).

To redress the omission, Linux Mint is adding its own, native ‘Night Light’ (or ‘Night Mode’, as Android calls it) feature the next Cinnamon desktop release, which will ship in Linux Mint 22.1 (due for release towards the end of the year, based on Mint’s usual release cadence).

Night Light consists in reducing the amount of blue light emitted by the screen. It makes the color of your monitor warmer as you get closer to bed time to help reduce eyestrain and improve sleep quality.

The Linux Mint team says its “hoping to have this feature fully integrated into the Cinnamon desktop and working out of the box, both in Wayland and Xorg”.

Redshift played a big part in popularising blue-light filters in computing in general — I was covering it on this blog back in 2010 — and while it still works (without location-detection features at present) it is an old app not compatible with Wayland.

So while Linux Mint Wayland support is formative right now (and Linux Mint 22.1 is to continue defaulting to Xorg) it certainly makes sense for the team to settle on a single, unified solution that will work across Xorg and Wayland.

That way, their devs relieve tired eyes from both reduced blue light, and the hassle of having to code another solution in a few years time when Linux Mint finally defaults to Wayland.

Are Night Light-style features something you use? Or do you never bother? I’d love to know your opinion on them down the comments (which if you can’t see is not because of me).