How to Use Nightlight Feature in Linux Mint

The night light has become an essential feature on desktop and mobile devices. It makes working at computers at night a lot less painful for the eyes.

On desktop Linux, GNOME and KDE desktop environments provide a built-in nightlight feature. However, Linux Mint’s flagship Cinnamon desktop didn’t get this feature out of the box for a long time.

The recent Linux Mint 22.1 Xia finally offers a built-in nightlight feature. For older Mint versions, things are slightly complicated.

Let's see how you can enable the night light feature in Linux Mint.

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If you are not sure, please check your Linux Mint version by using this command:

cat /etc/issue

Enable night light feature on Linux Mint 22.1 and above

With Linux Mint 22.1 Xia, setting nightlight is as simple as enabling a toggle button in system settings.

Click on the Linux Mint menu on the panel and search for “Night Light”. Enter to open the night light settings.

Click on the start menu and search for "Night Light". Enter to open the night-light settings for Linux Mint — Night Light Settings

Inside the settings, enable the Night Light toggle button.

Toggle the night-light button on to enable Night Light Mode on Linux Mint — Toggle on night light button

This will set the default color temperature automatically. Also, the night mode will be enabled automatically at sun set based on your system timezone.

You can slide the temperature bar to adjust the temperature and use the Preview button to view the result, that will be applied at sunset.

Change the night-light color temperature using the slider. Click on the preview button to view the effect that is going to be applied to the screen. — Change Night Light and Preview

Change the activation time

If you are not interested in the default schedule time of Night Light, you can change it to custom time limits. Use the dropdown button for the “Schedule” option and change it to “Automatic” to “Specify start and end times”.

Set custom start and end time for night light in Linux Mint. — Custom start and end time

Now, change the start and end time according to your preferences.

Using Night Light in Linux Mint 22 and older

Earlier Mint used to include Red Shift (redshift-gtk)by default to provide the night light feature.

But it is not installed by default anymore. Red Shift used Mozilla's location service through geoclue2 package. Mozilla has retired this service and hence Mint decided to stop offering Red Shift out of the box.

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You can still install redshift-gtk and manually configure it with your location to get night light feature in Mint 22 and older versions. You need to know the longitude and latitude of your location.

Install and use Redshift-gtk manually

Even though the Linux Mint team decided against the inclusion of Redshift in the installations, the package is still available in the repositories. Install it using the command:

sudo apt install redshift-gtk

Once installed, you need to edit the configuration files. The configuration file for the Redshift should be present at ~/.config/redshift.conf

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If you are familiar with Nano or any other terminal-based text editor, you can use that to edit the config file. I have used the graphical editor xed here for the comfort of beginners.

Use this command to open the config file in Xed editor:

xed ~/.config/redshift.conf &

Inside this file, add the location details. For this, I will be using an example config provided on the Redshift man page, with slight variation in color temperature and latitude and longitude value.

[redshift]
temp-day=6500
temp-night=3400
gamma=0.8
adjustment-method=randr
location-provider=manual

[manual]
lat=40.71
lon=74.00

Here, I used the latitude and longitude values for New York. You can get the value simply through a web search of your city, let's say “New York latitude and longitude”.

Save the file. Now you can open Redshift from the Cinnamon menu button.

Open Redshift from Cinnamon Menu. — Open Redshift

You can see a panel item is opened for Redshift. Now, the screen temperature will be applied based on day/night of your location.

Redshift in panel with Tokyo coordinates applied. — Redshift with Tokyo Coordinates

Other methods

On Linux Mint, there are some applets, that use Redshift and provide the Night Light features. But there are some important points to be noted before using them:

Since they use Redshift, you need to manually set the latitude and longitude value of your city in the respective applet settings.
These applets comes with a warning about possible Cinnamon crash/freeze. So, if you experience such issues, disable the extensions.
You should have the redshift package installed.
There is no need to have redshift.conf file. In fact, the QRedshift applet will warn you to remove the configuration file if it is present.
Applets can be installed from the Applets application on Linux Mint.

Redshift

This simple applet allows you to enable Night Light, change the color temperature etc. You can right-click on the applet and select configure to get the applet configuration.