Bedtime Mode For Linux

If there's something I'm guilty of doing time and time again is going past my bedtime. The main culprits are, of course, social media, Netflix, and pretty much any interesting article I find on the "Internetz."

As I've discovered, there's no better alternative than having the proper mindset, motivation and self-control for stopping this behavior, but I'm also at the point where I accept all the help I can get.

Speaking of help, here's a little GNOME extension that caught my eye. It's called Bedtime Mode, and it's designed to emulate Android's Bedtime Mode by converting the entire GNOME desktop/workspace to grayscale.

What does this achieve? Well, in theory, by reducing the color stimuli on the screen (aka making it gray) you reduce the visual distractions, therefore making content (or literally everything) less engaging, and ultimately, curb screentime.

I've found Bedtime Mode to be a very interesting little extension. The main idea behind it may not have real-world merits for some of us, but since it's so nicely designed and has so much customization options that it's definitely worth a shot.

Speaking of customization options, you can set an automatic schedule so that the extension turns itself on or off by itself, you can also control the so-called on-demand button's (topbar icon) visibility, position and appearance, and choose between various color presets such as Grayscale, Amber, Sepia, Green and Cyan.

Personally, I found the default grayscale and sepia effects to be the best in terms of the strain it relieves your eyes of. The fact that the extension also provides a quick way to change the color intensity made me love it even more.

You can install the extension from the official EGO website, or even easier, with the help of the amazing Extension Manager app. It supports all the latest GNOME versions (and can even be installed on older version of GNOME such as 3.36).

Admittedly, having all your screen grayscale is not something that will fundamentally change your behavior. However, I found that it's profoundly more "in-your-face" than GNOME's built-in Night Mode (which has a similar design philosophy).

Sure, you could argue that grayscale does help with the power consumption of your computer (even though I haven't thoroughly benchmark tested this theory) but definitely not the main reason why you would want to use this extension.

I've found Bedtime Mode to be a very interesting project. When it comes to GNOME extensions, I found that it's the little things that separate the good from the very good, and Bedtime Mode is definitely one of the latter. A prime example of this is how the extension makes the transition when it's turned on or off - the effect is slowed down allowing your brain and eyes to adjust to the change.

Clearly, it won't appeal to everyone. I find it very cool and useful, but you may not. What I can say for sure is that it's definitely worth checking out.