f.lux with Hue at 5% brightness after a restart
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I am running Windows 11 and using a Philips Hue Bridge with 3 lights. A couple of months ago I started to notice that once I'd been up and running for awhile (with f.lux working correctly), and I restarted the computer, f.lux would set the lights to a very low brightness value once it started again. I see this issue has been brought to your attention here and here, and that the second link provides a work-around.
I don't know if it's useful, but there seems to be an interaction with how the Philips phone app is controlling the lights? When the problem happens, if I set the brightness to 100% in the app, f.lux will drop it right back down to 5%. But if I set it below that (I usually do ~90%), it will stay at that level. If I then open the f.lux task-tray area and hit the preview cycle, the problem will be fixed once the preview completes. f.lux will go back to controlling the brightness and color as desired.
I've also noticed a new notification popup in the upper right corner of the screen that says "Waiting for Hue" that started showing up around the same time? Not the same time as in when the brightness issue happens, just randomly it will pop up and stay there for 5-10 seconds... not sure if that's related...
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@Capacitor-0 yes this update has a big effort to acknowledge other controllers and not overwrite their changes like we used to.
With multiple controllers, there are tons of "race conditions" where maybe we "see" changes halfway through some other controller making them (some will make a lot of changes over time) and so we do a lot of backoff and waiting for things to settle down.
I think the one you're describing is when we interpret the state of your system as a power on reset - so as if you flipped the wall switch and the bulbs reset to the default state. It's the only signal we ignore, because it is so common and it usually does not mean "the user actually wants the lights to come on at the default state". Obviously we got that wrong in your case - that's not true here, so we will go over it again and see if we can figure out some ways to limit it more.
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@herf But that's backwards, isn't it? I rebooted the computer; f.lux restarted. Why would it treat that like the switch being flipped? And why would the response ever be to set the brightness to 5%...? That's lower than it ever gets in its normal profile.
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@Capacitor-0 We released 4.126 to beta track today - it should be more careful to avoid reading old state immediately after startup.
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@herf I just opted in for betas and updated to 4.127, and I still get the drop to low brightness on resets. I've also noticed that the problem happens when I restart f.lux. Every time I exit and then re-launch the program, the brightness changes to the ~5% value. Now though, I can set the brightness from the phone app and it stays. I don't need to run the preview cycle to fix it anymore.
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@Capacitor-0 more fixes going up now in 4.128.
