Blue light reduction features have become an increasingly popular in smart devices and operating systems, such as Night Light in Windows 10 and Night Shift in macOS as well as iOS. However, users of Chrome OS have so far been left without a baked-in solution but Google is planning to change the situation.
According to a discovery on Reddit, an official 'Night Light' mode appears to be making its way into Chrome OS. However, it has yet to hit the stable channel as far as operating system releases are concerned and you'll need to switch your device over to the Canary channel to access it.
Furthermore, if you do decide to proceed at your own risk, your Chromebook will be wiped clean and will likely become more unreliable. Plus, if you want to go back to the stable channel, you'll have to create and boot from a recovery disk which ultimately means that this process is not for the faint of heart.
If you're still interested, then here is how to go about switching to the Canary channel:
- With the Chromebook powered off, hold down Esc + Refresh (F5) + Power
- When the warning / recovery prompt appears, press Ctrl + D to switch to Developer Mode
- Press Ctrl + Alt + T to open a command prompt
- Type shell then press Enter
- Type sudo su and press Enter to obtain root access
- Then, to switch to the Canary channel, type update_engine_client –channel=canary-channel –update
Once the process has completed, Chrome OS should then boot up in the Canary channel where you can then enable the Night Light feature via 'Settings'.
Finally, you'll probably want to revert back to verified mode to avoid the need to hit Ctrl + D every time you boot up the device. All you need to do is press the spacebar when prompted to reboot after the update has completed.
Of course, if the above sounds overwhelming, then it's recommended you stay put on the stable channel in order to avoid any unnecessary angst.
Source: Reddit via 9to5Google
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