Luxel

A native GNOME app (Rust + GTK4 + libadwaita) for controlling LIFX smart bulbs from the Linux desktop — no phone required.

Features

• Local control, no cloud needed — bulbs are discovered directly on your Wi-Fi/LAN using the LIFX UDP protocol (port 56700) and controlled with millisecond latency.
• Isolated IoT networks supported — if your bulbs live on a separate subnet/VLAN where broadcast discovery can't reach them, list their subnets in Preferences (e.g. 192.168.20.0/24). Each configured subnet gets a directed-broadcast probe plus a unicast sweep of every host address (up to a /22), which routes across VLANs. Your router's firewall must allow traffic from this machine to the IoT network on UDP port 56700.
• Optional LIFX Cloud support — add a personal access token (from https://cloud.lifx.com/settings) in Preferences to list and control lights through the cloud, e.g. when you're on a different network. When a bulb is reachable both ways, local control is always preferred.
• Rooms — bulbs are grouped into room sections (from their LIFX group by default; assign any bulb to a different or new room from its Room field). Every room header has a color button (wheel + warmth popover), power switch, and brightness slider, and an "All Lights" row applies the same controls to the whole house at once.
• Scenes — save the current state of your lights under a name and restore it with one click, choosing exactly which lights each scene includes. Scenes are stored locally, so they work without any cloud account.
• Per-bulb power switch, brightness slider, and a Colors/Whites mode toggle: Colors shows a LIFX-style hue/saturation wheel (white center, colors toward the rim) plus an RGB hex entry (#RRGGBB); Whites shows a color-temperature (warmth) slider with a typed kelvin entry (1500–9000 K) and the live LIFX shade name (Incandescent, Daylight, …). Live state polling means external changes (app, physical switch) show up automatically.
• Bulbs go insensitive when unreachable.

Controls

Action	Shortcut
Rescan for lights	Ctrl+R
Preferences	Ctrl+,
Quit	Ctrl+Q

Building

Development build

Requires gtk4-devel and libadwaita-devel (Fedora) or equivalent.

cargo run

Flatpak

Requires the GNOME 50 SDK and the Rust extension:

flatpak install flathub org.gnome.Platform//50 org.gnome.Sdk//50 \
    org.freedesktop.Sdk.Extension.rust-stable//25.08

Then build and install:

flatpak-builder --user --install --force-clean build \
    build-aux/io.github.hyprlab.Luxel.json
flatpak run io.github.hyprlab.Luxel

The flatpak builds offline from vendored crate sources. After changing dependencies in Cargo.toml, regenerate the list with:

./build-aux/regenerate-cargo-sources.sh

Sandbox permissions

• --share=network — required both for LAN UDP discovery/control and for the optional cloud API.
• Wayland (with X11 fallback) and DRI for rendering.

Nothing else: no host filesystem access. The cloud token is stored in the app's sandboxed config directory (~/.var/app/io.github.hyprlab.Luxel/config/luxel/config.json).

Architecture

• src/lan.rs — background thread speaking the LIFX LAN protocol over UDP (lifx-core): broadcast discovery every 10 s, state polling every 3 s, set-power/set-color commands.
• src/cloud.rs — background thread for the LIFX HTTP API (api.lifx.com/v1).
• src/ui/ — libadwaita UI. Both backends report bulbs keyed by serial number, so a bulb seen by both is merged into a single row; commands route to the LAN when the bulb is locally reachable, falling back to the cloud.

License

AGPL-3.0-or-later