KDE currently shows a “sunrise and sunset times cannot be determined at your location due to polar day” error when the device location is set to an extreme latitude during the summer time, which is perfectly fine. However, the result is that the night light feature then defaults to ON instead of OFF, which is counterintuitive because during polar day there is plenty of light out and night light is not needed.
For reference, I live in interior Alaska at around 64.8 degrees North, which is high enough for full 24 hours of daylight in the summer but not enough for full polar night in the winter. However, I’d imagine that plasma has a similar error message for polar night in which case the night light should be kept on until the sun rises again.
My suggestion is to alter the behavior of the night light feature to turn off automatically if the device location is in a state of polar day so that I don’t have to manually disable and re-enable it twice a year. I would also like an offset slider for the start and end times of the night light since there is often still a lot of light out past the “official” sunset time during the summer (and likewise there is often not enough light out at the official sunrise in the winter to warrant full screen brightness).
this is certainly a legitimate use case as sunrise and sunset are fairly meaningless at higher latitudes.
to help with the lack of day/nite cycle that our bodies need, a visual cue in the nightlight feature might be of physiological and psychological benefit.
would the option for a manual day/night control be more appropriate rather than it being based on sunrise/sunset.
i could see others, even at lower latitudes, making use of such a feature when they want more manual control over the feature… either because they work indoors or they work odd shifts and want to reset the internal clock to match their schedule (or both).
I think that the manual control option for the night light fits what you’re saying, however for me the feature is more about mitigating eye strain than preserving my sleep schedule.
However this manual mode is of little use to me since right now I am losing 7 minutes of light per day so any times I input manually will be an hour off roughly every 8 days.
then it sounds like what you want is a seasonal cut out above a certain latitude where the feature would simply be disabled completely (full color temp) for months on end until the next cut off where it would shift into perpetual night light.
with no day/night cycles at all?
seems like a shell script would be a better solution for this problem where it would simply toggle the state from always on to always off at seasonal times of your choosing.
also have you tried setting day/night cycles for a manual location that is farther south, to get approximately the correct seasonal variation?
Not exactly, no. I want night light to activate between the official sundown and sunrise, minus a buffer I set (e.g. wait 20 minutes after sundown and start 20 minutes before sunrise) for most of the year. Then, in mid-May (when the 24 hours of daylight starts) keep night light permanently off until August when the sun starts to set again, at which point it will resume its on-off cycle based on the sun’s position. Then, in latitudes with polar night starting in late fall/early winter, the night light remains permanently on until the sun rises again toward the end of the winter.
So, to recap, what I want is:
Polar night = always on
Polar day = always OFF
Normal day/night cycle = functions as normal (turning on and off every 24 hours)
Instead of how it works right now, which is:
Polar night = always on
Polar day = always ON
Normal day/night cycle = functions as normal (turning on and off every 24 hours)
so there are months in the year where you want the usual day/night - but with an adjustable threshold, instead of the default so you can have more control on when it kicks in/out.
AND
you want a polar day/night setting applied on top of that based on latitude that overrides the function above during certain months out of the year.
this seems like a good feature request for bugs.kde.org to file under the plasma desktop.