Support for f.lux in Windows 7
 

Hello,

I have a USB Plugable USB port replicator, which is based on the DisplayLink chipset. The Hardware IDs are:
USB\VID_17E9&PID_4323&REV_3100&MI_05
USB\VID_17E9&PID_4323&MI_05

There is a discussion in this post on this forum about Windows 10 support: for f.lux:
http://support.displaylink.com/forum...lux-on-windows

This post on this forum suggest that it is fully supported since September 2017:
http://support.displaylink.com/forum...lux-on-windows

For my Windows 7 laptop, I've updated my USB Plugable driver to the latest 8.3.1728 version, and my f.lux version to 4.55, and it still isn't working.

Many thanks,
Paul

Hello,

F.lux has been doing some work in parallel to DisplayLink to enable their application to work on DisplayLink technology.
These were using two different, independent and unrelated ways, of achieving a similar result.
We discovered that when the F.lux team released DisplayLink support from their software whilst we were still in development. We had consulted when starting the work on this though months before and this was also before night mode was also introduced in Windows 10.

Because we uncovered flaws with our implementation, I unfortunately had to pull the plug and remove the feature from the release. The code is present but disabled because of the collateral damage it will cause.
Because F.lux has now already released support for most, this has not been possible for me to justify restarting the development compared to other items like performance and CPU usage reduction as more people are asking for these.

To summarise, today there is F.lux support on devices using DisplayLink technology from F.lux custom implementation. Their implementation is not machine universal.
I still have the DisplayLink implementation review in the product roadmap, but this is not scheduled currently.

In the meantime, you could manually force enable the feature on 8.3 by tweaking the registry if you really want to take the risk with the crashes and don't mind things freezing and loss of control.
I do not advise it. You will have problems.

Regards,
Alban

Hello Alban,

Many thanks for the reply.

Have you more information regarding the f.lux implementation?
I posted a question on their forums, and according to the reply I received, it is not supported for Windows 7.
https://forum.justgetflux.com/topic/...king-station/5

Paul

Hello Paul,

We do, but this is not appropriate for me to discuss as this could include confidential information.

Thank you for the link, I misunderstood the scope of what they released.
I need to review our exchanges to see what we can do.

Kind regards,
Alban

Good morning,

I have reviewed my email history on this.
From what I can see, this is only not working for a subset of Windows 7 users.
For this reason I understand the not "supported" as in technical assistance and bug fixing.

I have re-added the Windows 10 support in the feature planning. Then, when this has been analyzed and delivered, we can look at what is left of Windows 7 and the effort needed to get this on Windows 7.

Windows 7 has been out of mainstream support from Microsoft since January 2015. This is approaching 3 years and this is making it extremely difficult for to justify starting to develop something for an OS which stopped shipping, and is not maintained anymore.

Kind regards,
Alban

Hi!, I've following this for several months already, and I created this account just to know how this process going :)

I'm a Windows 7 user, I've already gone through windows 10 but I sticked to W7 again (for working purposes and because I like it a bit more)

Still there're way more people with W7 than with W10, and W7 also has extended support till 2020.
May be there's no need to start developing it from 0. I assume you have already a version of it, so I would like to know if you will check if worth it to make it work for W7 (which will be great! )

Hello and welcome,

I would tend to believe that Windows 7 is being replaced day after day. For instance, as far as I understand it, Windows 7 being in [I]extended[/I ]support would mean no new feature and only security patches since January 13, 2015. No new investment or feature fix.
Also, Windows 7 is unlikely to be used on newer machine (I really mean "shouldn't be used") because updates won't install on them so I'd expect people to have to go to Windows 10. I think this is reinforced by Meltown and Spectre we could expect users to want fixed on their machine as it's been very well covered in the news.
When we looked at doing f.lux on Windows 10, we uncovered a bug in the OS. Microsoft fixed it straight away in their following release (It took less than one business day between us flagging and them committing a fix!!). This wouldn't happen on Windows 7.

The feature to enable f.lux was supposed to be released and was pulled because of the unacceptable quality level. The architecture has to be redone if it is to become a released feature, a full review was performed to understand how the fundamental issues were found so late and adjustments were made.
I encourage you to have a look at some effect of having it enabled. I strongly believe these cannot be released to millions of users of the technology, most of them probably don't really wish/need colour correction.
I also personally very much wanted to get that feature and that's why I scheduled its development initially, first based on user feedback of course.

If you feel like it, and understand your computer *will* be unstable, you might add the registry key to force enable the feature. I personally don't believe the benefit outweighs the inconviences and this is why I am unable to advise enabling the feature today.

Today, I am unable to commit to a delivery on Windows 7. This is not that we believe this would be wasted effort, this is because we are having to prioritise based on how many people might use it when the feature is delivered versus other requests we have received: what brings the most business value to most people.

Kind regards,
Alban

What a great answer. Everything clear. So f.lux + displaylink will be supported from now on just on W10. Thanks and have a great weekend!