Looking for a color picker tool for Linux? Try Eyedropper, a new GTK4 application that looks native in modern GNOME desktop.

It’s a free and open-source tool written in Rust programming language. Which, provides an easy to use interface to pick a color and display in HEX, RGB, HSV, HSL, CMYK, XYZ and CIE-Lab formats, as well as handy “Copy to clipboard” icons to quickly copy the values.

User can either use the header-bar picker icon, or click on color bar to open the template for choosing colors. And, edit color by changing the HEX value.

The preferences dialog has options to toggle which color values to display. By setting “Alpha-Value-Position”, it can enable the alpha channel (opacity of a color). However, it’s only available by editing the HEX value so far.

Depends on Alpha-Value-Position option you set, either the first 2 or last 2 values in HEX code applies the color opacity. Though, the alpha channel so far does not work for other color formats!

How to install Eyedropper

The app is available to install in most Linux via universal Flatpak package.

1. First, follow the setup guide to enable Flatpak support. Ubuntu 20.04 | 22.04 can simply press Ctrl+Alt+T to open terminal and run command to enable it:

sudo apt install flatpak

2. Then, go to the Github releases page. Click expand “Assets” section of the latest release and select download the .flatpak package.

Finally, install the package via command:

cd ~/Downloads && flatpak install com.github.finefindus.eyedropper.flatpak

The app is also available in Flathub repository, so you can also run the command below in terminal to install the package:

flatpak install https://dl.flathub.org/repo/appstream/com.github.finefindus.eyedropper.flatpakref

After installation, search for and open it from ‘Activities’ overview just like native applications.

Uninstall Eyedropper

To remove the tool, open a terminal window and run command:

flatpak uninstall --delete-data com.github.finefindus.eyedropper

Also clean up useless run-time libraries (if any) via flatpak uninstall --unused.

For designers want to check color contrast, there are a few handy little tools in Linux Desktop to do the job. Kontrast is the one designed for KDE though works on all Linux desktops.

GNOME has a stylish color contrast tool. Though it’s now in early stage which does not work well and freezes often at least in my case. Here I’ll introduce the KDE’s Kontrast.

This little app displays font color for text and another color as background. Users may change the font and background colors by:

• manually input a color value.
• use built-in color picker.
• drag slider bar to change hue, saturation, and lightness.
• or use “Randomize” button to generate a pair of colors.

For each color combination, it displays the contrast ratio, and readability (“Perfect”, “Good”, or “Bad”) for normal and large text. There’s also “Invert” button to reverse the two colors. As you can see, it allows to mark color as favorite, though it somehow always fail in my case.

How to Install Kontrast in Ubuntu via apt:

For Ubuntu 21.04 and Ubuntu 21.10, this handy tool has been made into official Ubuntu repositories. Simply press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open terminal and run command to install it:

sudo apt install kontrast

Though for non-KDE desktop, there will be a lot of dependency libraries also to be installed.

Install Kontrast in Ubuntu 20.04 and older versions:

Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 18.04, and even Ubuntu 16.04 users may install the latest version using the Linux universal flatpak package.

1.) Firstly, press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open terminal. Then run command to install the flatpak daemon:

sudo apt install flatpak

Ubuntu 18.04 and 16.04 need to add this stable PPA first.

2.) Next, add the flathub repository that hosts the package:

flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo

3.) Finally install the color contrast checker app via command:

flatpak install flathub org.kde.kontrast

For first time installing KDE app as flatpak, there are almost 800 MB run-time libraries to be installed:

Once installed, search for and open the tool from activities overview screen and enjoy!

How to Remove Kontrast:

To remove the package installed via apt, use command:

sudo apt remove --autoremove kontrast

For the flatpak, use this command instead to remove it:

flatpak uninstall --delete-data kontrast

And run flatpak uninstall --unused command will delete the unused run-time libraries.