A blue light filter may soon come built-in to the KDE Plasma desktop.
Developers have been working on adding color correction features to the KWin (the KDE window manager/compositor) in Wayland.
Although commits that expose color temperature tweaking are not yet merged (at least, not at the time of writing) it’s still possible that Plasma 5.11, which is due in September, could ship with support for Night Color — provided that it works as intended and doesn’t introduce new bugs.
‘The Night Color feature will automatically change the color temperature of your display based on your location;
Many people adjust the screen temperature with a blue light filter app or tool (like Redshift) as a way to reduce eye strain.
But there are other purported benefits attributed to a reduction on the amount of blue light emitted by our computer displays.
As we explained when GNOME introduced Night Light: “blue light from our screens fools our brains in to thinking that it’s still day time, which in turns affects our circadian rhythm (aka our internal clock/biological clock), which in turn impacts on our energy. Some studies show that melatonin production (a hormone that regulates sleep and wakefulness) is adversely affected by prolonged exposure to blue light.”
As in GNOME the KDE “blue light reduction” feature will automatically change the color temperature based on your location. As the sun sets in the evenings the amount of “blue” emitted is reduced, and then increases again in the daytime when the sun rises.
Based on the mockups attached to the various commits it will also be possible to create a custom schedule so that the Night Color feature only does it thing when you want it to.
You can see a shaky cam demo of the KDE Night Color feature in this YouTube video:
