ScreenGuard: open-source screen time tracker and app blocker for Linux [AI-Assisted - light]

FOSS Applications/Projects
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Hi — I’m the developer of ScreenGuard, an open-source screen time tracker and app
blocker for Linux desktops, and I’d like to know whether it’s useful to anyone
else.

The gap it fills: Android ships Digital Wellbeing — per-app screen time, daily
app limits that actually enforce themselves, focus sessions. Linux has had
nothing equivalent, so I made one.

What it does:

  • Screen time tracking — live and historical per-app usage, with week-by-week
    navigation
  • Daily app limits — set a budget per app (say 45 minutes of Firefox); when it
    runs out, the app is locked for the rest of the day rather than nagged
  • Focus mode — Pomodoro-style sessions where the apps you pick stay locked
  • Local-first — local SQLite only; no account, no cloud, no telemetry, no ads

Support: works on all X11 desktops (GNOME, KDE, XFCE, MATE, Cinnamon, LXQt, i3
and others), and natively on GNOME Wayland through a bundled GNOME Shell
extension (GNOME 45+, plain GJS). KDE Plasma Wayland and Hyprland are next.
Written in Flutter, GPL-3.0, currently v1.1.2.

Install on Ubuntu/Debian/Mint/Zorin/Pop!_OS:

sudo wget -O /usr/share/keyrings/screenguard.asc https://adityakrishnan005-a11y.github.io/ScreenGuard/apt/key.asc
echo “deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/screenguard.asc] https://adityakrishnan005-a11y.github.io/ScreenGuard/apt apt main” | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/screenguard.list
sudo apt update && sudo apt install screenguard

On Fedora/RHEL/Rocky:

sudo dnf copr enable the-amibivert/screenguard
sudo dnf install screenguard

Also .deb and .rpm packages, a standalone tarball, AUR, and Nix.

Source: GitHub - adityakrishnan005-a11y/ScreenGuard: Digital Wellbeing for Linux — Screen Time Tracking, Daily App Limits & Focus Mode (GNOME Wayland & X11) · GitHub
Project page: ScreenGuard — Digital Wellbeing for Linux
Screenshots: https://adityakrishnan005-a11y.github.io/ScreenGuard/screenshots/banner.png

What I’d like feedback on:

  1. The GNOME Wayland side is the interesting part — the extension reports the
    focused window to the app over D-Bus. Is there a better-sanctioned way to do
    that?
  2. Wayland support is limited to GNOME only so i would like feedback from you guys on that
  3. Is the Daemon Heavy? i have been recently learning C and making small C helpers and Aim to make it into a native C daemon
2

I need to ask you to declare the extent to which AI was used in developing this app … both in coding and in documentation.

I would also like to take this opportunity to inform you that if you copy AI written text to posts on this forum , it should be in quote marks and you should indicate its source … just like you would if quoting a passage from a book.
We do not accept posts that are 100% AI text … at least some of the post should be human text.

3

thank you for the heads up . Also the AI use extent (no slop only for debug and review) is mentioned cleanly …i have looked into it .

4

Yes, we found it in your README..
I will mark it [AI-Assisted] in the title
The coding is your own work … it is clearly not vibe-coded
I understand that you may be using AI to assist with your English … that is, of course , OK

5

Like Neville i asked about his AI content here is his reply

there !
the extent of AI used is mentioned clearly in the README and is limited to debugging and Documentations or summaries all code MUST be written manually as is the rule for contribution even for me thee creator.
Thank you
Aditya Krishnan