How to install and use desktop dimmer on Ubuntu 16.04 / Arch / MacOS

Hello good people, welcome to our guide on how to install and use a desktop dimmer on Ubuntu 16.04, Arch and macOS. Desktop dimmer is a tool used to adjust the display on your Laptop’s screen and external screens as well to ensure your eyes doesn’t strain while working for long hours on your screen. This is ideal when working at night, bright lights at night are not good for your eyes.

Features of Desktop Dimmer:

Below are some good features of Desktop dimmer.

• It is cross-platform – runs on MacOS, Linux, and Windows
• It has a minimal user interface and small resource footprint – Can run well on old hardware
• Its settings are persisted and restored per-Display without any configuration hence it is Unobtrusive.
• It handles connecting and disconnecting from external displays automatically. No settings need to be changed whenever you change the display.
• It is open source – MIT License. This tool is developed by sidneys

Installing Desktop Dimmer on Ubuntu 16.04

Installation of Desktop Dimmer is easy with the use of Ubuntu dpkg package manager. But first head to Desktop Dimmer releases page and make sure you pull the latest release. You can download it manually or use tools like wget and curl. In this guide, I’ll use wget to download and install with dpkg -i commands. 

Download Desktop Dimmer binary:

As of this writing, the latest stable release is 4.0.4. It is recommended to first check releases before running below command.

$ wget https://github.com/sidneys/desktop-dimmer/releases/download/v4.0.4/desktop-dimmer-4.0.4-amd64.deb

Then install it on Ubuntu using

$ sudo dpkg -i desktop-dimmer-4.0.4-amd64.deb

Notice that I downloaded the 64-bit version. If your operating system has a 32-bit architecture, make sure you download i386 release. If by any chance you get dependency issues, you can resolve it using:

$ sudo apt-get -f install

This will ensure all missing dependencies are resolved and install Desktop Dimmer.

Installing Desktop Dimmer on Arch Linux

For Arch Linux users, you can install Desktop Dimmer from AUR using tools like yaourt or pacaur. With yaourt, run the commands:

$ yaourt -S desktop-dimmer

Once installed, you can launch it from CLI or your DE applications menu.ß

$ desktop-dimmer

Installing Desktop Dimmer on MacOS

For macOS, download latest .dmg file of Desktop Dimmer. Latest of now is 4.0.4,

$ wget https://github.com/sidneys/desktop-dimmer/releases/download/v4.0.4/desktop-dimmer-4.0.4.dmg

Once downloaded, double-click the application and install it like any other Mac application. You’ll be able to launch it from the launchpad menu.