Night Light does not turn on hour after sunset

Ubuntu 20.04.1:
It is already dark in the Netherlands (around 17.30), for a while now, yet Night Light doesn’t turn on. It is enabled and set to sunrise-sunset, the time schedule is greyed out (but I only see zeros so I have no clue what it considers to be sunset).

It seems like it does not adjust to seasons? Because a few months ago, it worked fine, turning on after 9 or 10 pm.

Not really sure. All I know here is that the applet toggles the GNOME night light capabilities. So any issues here are in the component called gnome-settings-daemon

The applet actually doesn’t work as expected. Every other similar applet turns something on/off. Like WiFi, Bluetooth.
The Night Light applet does not actually turn it on/off. It enables or disables the chosen schedule.

I haven’t found a way to manually turn Night Light on/off… there just don’t seem to be any :frowning:

The manual schedule should be available via Settings (Gnome Settings)

are you sure ?
because I am also living in Netherlands and you know the beauty is when you turn it on from sunrise to sunset the time is automatically set like ( from 4:45 PM until 08:15 AM ).
The applet is also working for me and I am on ubuntu 20.04
did you try to change the temperature ??
for me I have set it to 3500.

Yes, there is a manual schedule. But I don’t want to use it. It would require me to change it constantly.
For the moments I need night light outside of a sunset/sunrise schedule, an on/off switch would be helpful.

@cpagrawal strange, it is at 3670 here.
When I change the slider slightly (in Settings), the screen changes but I believe that’s only for demo purposes as it changes back when I close the settings.

Just FYI it used to work fine. I just noticed it hasn’t been working for a while and I thought the automatic schedule was the culprit.

@cpagrawal, where do you see the actual time of the sunrise/sunset that has been set for the automatic schedule?

Out of curiosity, do you have location services turned on? I think the sunrise to sunset feature relies on that.

did you tried to uninstall and re install the applet. ?
You should be able to see it under - “display settings or screen display”.

attached is screenshot.

also my location services are on.

i was trying to figure out how to make it work manually.
everytime i choose manual, it still works on the timer.
now i found the other settings and changed it’s time to kick in earlier.
dark here at 5pm nowadays.
i can manually enable it off/on as long as it has come on by timer, but can’t chose manual and have it work actually manually off/on.
changing the time will rectify my problem.
still getting used to and finding things in linux.

That was the issue (location services), thanks!
Still think the applet should be an on/off switch for Night Light instead of an enable/disable switch for its schedule.

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it is possible by using applet. is it not working for you ?
did you try to remove and install the applet again ?

let me see if i get this then.
manual is for manually setting the time to turn off/on, not to actually manually switch it off/on when wanted by the switch?
so if i wanted to turn it on in the middle of a dark cloudy day i’d have to set the time manually to come on?
and what i think is a defect is a feature? :grinning:

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Yes. Basically, manual just means you set the on / off times yourself. The switch does not turn Night Light mode on and off. If the switch is on, it follows a schedule (whether manual or sunrise/sunset). If it’s set to off, it’s will never come on.

I guess if you wanted to use the applet switch to manually toggle the Night Light mode instead of using a schedule, you could just use the Manual Schedule, but set the on and off times to be exactly the same (i.e. from 0:00 to 0:00). Now the switch will do what you want I think, and turn the Night Light mode on and off. The big downside to this method is that it won’t turn on and off automatically anymore, since now technically it is always scheduled to be on.

nightlight

The way the applet works now is just badly designed. An applet is there to quickly toggle things on and off. This is the only applet that doesn’t do that.

Modifying schedules to get the functionality makes no sense. Especially for Budgie, being user friendly this is a downer.

This is the bit of code in question

As you may understand, the switch toggles the night light capability on/off. This is the on/off as provided by GNOME

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thank you.
that is the conclusion i came to. :grinning:
i’ll try the time set and see if it accomplishes what i want.
just some cloudy darkish daytime conditions makes a person want it in the middle of the day sometimes.
a true toggling switch would be perfect.
which is what i thought “manual” was.
as i read here i finally understood.
it’s not broken, manual is just not what i thought it was. :upside_down_face:

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today I noticed something that if you are using night light applet and screen brightness applet together it could be very strange experience too. so please check if you are using both. I think I am feeling strange because I am using first time both applets.

yeah - don’t use both - they will be both fighting each other because they call the same underlying gnome-setting-daemon functions that affect the screen display.