Dark Reader, rest your eyes on a dimmer page background

Linux Discussion
1

Bright white paper is a recent invention, before paper bleaching, paper was made of various materials, animal hide, and most recent before tree-paper, hemp.

All of which has a tan / brown color.

Most books still use the unbleached beige tone paper, and why? Is it a cost savings, or is it the obvious fact that it is more relaxing to our eyes to read?

Or is it more aesthetics based reasoning?

If people who read books had severe difficulty reading the pages, because of the off-white / tan color, then bleached paper would be the standard in books.

How about large-print books? Why don’t those use bleached white paper? Wouldn’t this clearly significantly increase contrast for those who need it? So why use unbleached paper?

So even though white backgrounds increase contrast, it is not the standard for long-form reading, nor is it standard for those with lower vision. So why follow this “default” idea for your computer system?

I have my computer themes to modify all bright elements a more saturated color that looks nice but still easy to read.

I think a lot of people would benefit from using the addon and would be amazed at how much nicer is it to stare at the screen, possibly even helping to induce more frequent blinking.

What I like so much is the ability to exactly match background and word color, and drop or increase brightness of words a small amount. This reduces the contrast of the words, giving the screen a much more faded, softer appearance.

The iOS safari addon of dark reader in the apple app store has 20+ presets, android has quite a number as well, just checked, but the presets are quite different. I would like to see a custom amount of presets, for now needing to use the backup and restore function to have such option.

2

At night I find a grey / smoky purple to really make it easy to unwind

color code #312131

Something like that as an example for dark reader, might look a little different on each screen but that’s the general look I set usually.

3

I prefer dark mode for basically everything but I don’t tend to use dark reader unless I have to because it sometimes alters too much and I like to know what the default design looks like . . . due to being a designer.

4

Most monitors don’t get much above 350 maybe 400 nits tops.

There is one HP 27" monitor that gets nearly 500 nits. I thought that was bright.

My old phone got 650 nits if you position it correctly outside.

The chromebook galaxy from samsung gets 750 nits, which is brighter than some old rugged laptops.

But to top it off, the HP dragonfly chromebook can really light up the night at 1,275 nits

Now, if I could figure out if it uses pulse-with-modulation (PWM) backlight dimming, this page is the only one I could find that has a blank for the frequency

https://www.notebookcheck.net/HP-Dragonfly-Pro-Chromebook.711418.0.html

So you could use this as a literal lightbox and set all the themes and web page backgrounds to blue-green.

According to Harvard research, green light has the same amount of power to decrease melatonin as blue light, until after a full hour of light exposure.

After an hour, blue light becomes twice as effective.

So just combining blue and green together makes the most sense, and doubles the brightness. With such a color, I guess you would lose 20-30% of the brightness depending on how strong the blue spike of the LEDs are, so maybe you’d get 900-1000 nits of blue-green light.

That’s brighter than any other laptop backlight designed and sold to date, so you could have $1,000 computer with Linux and a lightbox in the same machine.