Alien Thunder

The Alienware Command Center bits you miss on Linux: per-key lighting, the G-Mode key, and live temperatures and fan speeds, on your panel and floating over your games.

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The problem

On Windows, Alienware laptops come with the Alienware Command Center. On Linux you get none of it: the keyboard lights stay whatever color they were, the turbo key (Fn+F1, G-Mode) does nothing, and there's no quick way to see how hot the CPU is or how fast the fans are spinning.

What Alien Thunder does

• Lighting. Color every key on its own, light the touchpad, the alien head on the lid and the power button, and save it all as profiles. Your profile comes back at login, after suspend and when the keyboard reconnects.
• Effects that keep your colors. Breathing, pulse, wave and twinkle only change how bright each light is, never its color. Keyboard, touchpad and alien head each get their own effect and speed.
• G-Mode. Fn+F1 works again: fans at full speed and the performance power profile, and the F1 key turns white while it's on, like on Windows.
• Music keys. The editor's Keys tab records Fn+F3 to Fn+F6 and assigns previous, stop, play/pause or next to each key, saved with the profile. Previous restarts a track after its first three seconds; press again right away to go back a track. The service controls MPRIS players, including browsers, and needs the same input group access as Fn+F1. In Brave, restarting a track also needs the Plasma Integration browser extension enabled.
• Readouts on the panel. CPU and GPU temperature, CPU load, GPU memory (VRAM) in use, both fan speeds and memory in use (in % and in GB), right next to the system tray and the clock. You pick which ones in the widget's settings.
• Overlay. The same readouts in a small bar that floats above every window, games in fullscreen included. Drag it anywhere, on any screen; its ✕ puts it away.
• Optional network widget. Alien Thunder · Network shows upload and download by application on the desktop, updated every two seconds, with a 90-second graph behind the application list and animated download/upload speedometers in fluorescent orange. A blinking red LED marks traffic at or above 90% of that direction's observed peak over those 90 seconds, not the connection's capacity. Each dial displays its automatic scale, based on the peak traffic in the graph. Enable or disable it with Network widget in the panel popup, or run alien-thunder network on / alien-thunder network off. It is also available in Plasma's Add Widgets list. Sort by either direction and optionally show idle applications. Plasma remembers its position and settings across logins. Right-click the network widget and choose Configure Alien Thunder · Network for its own settings: digital/analog style (or follow Alien Thunder), sorting, idle applications, the background graph and blinking alerts. These preferences apply only to that network widget. Its Support tab also includes the Bitcoin and EVM donation wallets, QR codes and copy buttons, shared with the main widget. It uses KDE System Monitor's org.kde.ksysguard.process module and ksgrd_network_helper (from libksysguard), including TCP and UDP; the helper needs the distribution's normal CAP_NET_RAW capability. The totals cover the listed application groups, not every packet on every interface. Processes started from a terminal can appear under that terminal, following KDE's application grouping.

How it looks

On your panel

The icon gets a white G while G-Mode is on. Temperatures turn yellow at 75 °C and red at 90 °C. Hover for a summary; click for the rest.

Click it

G-Mode and the overlay are one switch each. Lighting opens the lighting editor.

The overlay

Grab the bar anywhere and drop it where you like, on either screen; it remembers the spot. The ✕ at its end turns the overlay off, and the switch on the panel brings it back. Untick a reading in the panel popup and the bar gets shorter. Drag the small triangle in its bottom-right corner to resize the entire bar, including the text. The percentage appears while dragging; release to apply. The size is saved across restarts and limited to the current screen. The bar briefly recreates its window when applying a size to keep layer-shell stable. The panel popup and General settings also provide an Overlay size slider from 50% to 250%, with a reset to 100%.

In Alien Thunder settings → General → Overlay and network gauges, choose Digital or Analog · Audi style. This one setting changes every reading in the floating bar and both network totals. The analog style uses dark round dials, white graduations and red needles with fluorescent orange accents, with the exact reading below. You can also switch styles from the overlay section of the panel popup. General → Panel gauge style independently chooses digital readings or compact analog dials for the taskbar. Show on the panel selects each sensor plus download and upload; network indicators use the same ten-second moving average. Compact dials keep the exact value beside the needle. CPU load, VRAM and RAM readings show a blinking red LED above 90% usage.

Turn on Desktop gauges in the panel popup (or run alien-thunder desktop on) to add the gauges to your desktop; turn it off with the same switch or alien-thunder desktop off. Plasma saves their position and size. You can also add Alien Thunder through Plasma's Add Widgets to use the same digital or analog readings on the desktop. General → Show on the desktop selects readings independently for each widget, without changing the panel or floating bar. Choose Desktop gauge style for its own analog or digital display. Desktop orientation chooses a horizontal strip (the default, like the overlay) or a vertical stack. Resizing in Plasma's edit mode scales the whole strip. Download and upload can be included in this desktop bar too.

Select Download and Upload under Show in the overlay to put network gauges in the floating bar, in either digital or analog style. The network widget has these switches too; selecting one there also turns the overlay on. From the terminal, use alien-thunder overlay show download (or upload), then alien-thunder overlay on. Network readings use the same application totals and 90-second automatic scale as the desktop network widget, independently of whether that widget is open. They are off by default and require KDE's network collector. All network gauges use a moving average of the last ten seconds (five samples), including their numeric readings. Scale and peak alerts follow these smoothed values. The application list and its graph keep the original two-second readings.

The lighting editor

Click keys to select them (Ctrl+click toggles, drag selects an area), pick a color, and the keyboard changes as you edit.

The Effects tab has one effect and one speed for the keyboard, one for the touchpad and one for the alien head; the background service draws them, and they only dim and brighten the colors you picked. Import from Windows reads the presets you made in the Alienware Command Center, if your Windows partition is mounted at /mnt/windows; it only reads, it never writes there.

Install

Download a package

Open the packages folder, find your Linux, download the file and open it with your software center, or paste the line under it into a terminal. There are packages for Fedora 43 and 44, openSUSE Tumbleweed and Leap 16.0, Debian 13, Ubuntu 25.10 and 26.04, and Arch with the systems built on it. Older Ubuntu and Debian releases lack PySide6 and the Plasma 6 pieces Alien Thunder needs.

After installing, run alien-thunder setup once as your own user (not root): it turns the service on, puts the widget next to the system tray and tells you if anything is missing.

From the repository, with updates

A downloaded package stays at its version. The signed repository on the openSUSE Build Service brings new versions with your system updates.

Fedora 43 and 44

sudo dnf config-manager addrepo --from-repofile=https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/cryptoconspiracy/Fedora_$(rpm -E %fedora)/home:cryptoconspiracy.repo
sudo dnf install alien-thunder

openSUSE Tumbleweed and Leap 16.0: set repo to openSUSE_Tumbleweed or openSUSE_Leap_16.0.

repo=openSUSE_Tumbleweed
sudo zypper addrepo -f https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/cryptoconspiracy/$repo/home:cryptoconspiracy.repo
sudo zypper install alien-thunder

Debian 13, Ubuntu 25.10 and 26.04: set repo to Debian_13, xUbuntu_25.10 or xUbuntu_26.04.

repo=Debian_13
curl -fsSL https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/cryptoconspiracy/$repo/Release.key | gpg --dearmor | sudo tee /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/alien-thunder.gpg >/dev/null
echo "deb https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/cryptoconspiracy/$repo/ /" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/alien-thunder.list
sudo apt update && sudo apt install alien-thunder

Arch and Arch-based: the AUR package follows when AUR registration reopens; until then, the signed repository:

curl -fsSL https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/cryptoconspiracy/Fedora_44/repodata/repomd.xml.key | sudo pacman-key --add -
sudo pacman-key --lsign-key 72E3A26E8377B7E2BFB5E9F1ADD09EAE97167CA4
printf '[home_cryptoconspiracy_Arch]\nServer = https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/cryptoconspiracy/Arch/$arch\n' | sudo tee -a /etc/pacman.conf
sudo pacman -Sy alien-thunder

Fn+F1 needs your user in the input group: sudo usermod -aG input $USER, then log out and back in.

From source

git clone https://github.com/cryptoconspiracy/alien-thunder.git
cd alien-thunder
./install.sh

Nothing needs root. If a package is missing (PySide6, python-dbus, python-gobject, layer-shell-qt, gettext), the installer says which and asks before installing it. It puts the widget on your panel right before the system tray, starts the background service, and adds Alien Thunder to the app menu.

The installer also offers to add a udev rule (it needs your password once) so your user can reach the lighting controllers, and Fn+F1 needs your user in the input group; alien-thunder setup tells you if either is missing.

Packagers

make && make DESTDIR=... install puts everything under /usr: the app, the panel widget, the user services, the udev rule and the icons. Each user then runs alien-thunder setup once, which turns the service on and puts the widget on the panel.

Releasing (maintainers)

make release VERSION=1.2.3 bumps the version everywhere, tags it, publishes the GitHub release with the widget, updates the AUR recipe and the openSUSE Build Service packages, waits for the builds, and copies them into packages/VERSION for the download page. DRY_RUN=1 does it all in a throwaway clone without publishing. If it stops while OBS is building, make packages VERSION=1.2.3 picks up from there.

Updating

git pull && ./install.sh

Removing

./uninstall.sh

Your lighting profiles stay in ~/.config/alien-thunder.

Will it work on my computer?

It was built on, and has only been tested on, an Alienware m16 R2 with the Brazilian (ABNT2) keyboard, on Arch-based Linux with KDE Plasma 6 on Wayland.

• Lighting talks to two USB devices: the keyboard (0d62:d2b1) and the AW-ELC chassis controller (187c:0551). Other Alienware laptops with those same controllers may work; the key map is the ABNT2 one.
• G-Mode relies on the kernel's alienware-wmi driver, which turns G-Mode on when the power profile goes to performance, and on power-profiles-daemon. The key is read from /dev/input, so your user has to be in the input group.
• Temperatures and fans come from alienware_wmi and coretemp. The GPU reading is the laptop's embedded controller, not the NVIDIA driver, so checking it every two seconds doesn't wake a sleeping GPU.
• The overlay needs a Wayland compositor with the layer-shell protocol (KWin has it).
• The panel widget needs KDE Plasma 6.

Language

Alien Thunder is in English and Brazilian Portuguese, and follows your system's language. If your system is set to Portuguese but that locale isn't generated, KDE falls back to English, and so does Alien Thunder, so the two always match.

For the curious: the command line

alien-thunder                    open the lighting editor
alien-thunder list               list the profiles (* = active)
alien-thunder set <profile>      make a profile the active one and apply it
alien-thunder status             service and device status
alien-thunder gmode [on|off|toggle]
alien-thunder overlay [on|off|show ITEM|hide ITEM|status]

ITEM is one of cpu_temp, gpu_temp, cpu_fan, gpu_fan, ram.

What's new

1.2

• CPU load, GPU memory (VRAM) in use and RAM in GB, on the panel and in the overlay. VRAM is only read while the NVIDIA GPU is already awake, so it never wakes one that is sleeping.
• The widget's settings choose the readings for the panel and for the overlay.
• The overlay no longer closes by itself (1.1.2).

1.1

• Now called Alien Thunder (it was AlienFX Studio). Profiles move over by themselves.
• G-Mode on Fn+F1, with the white F1 key.
• Effects for the keyboard, the touchpad and the alien head, each on its own, and none of them changes your colors. The effects that did (rainbow, spectrum, the keyboard's hardware effects) are gone; saved profiles switch to the closest one that keeps colors.
• Temperatures, fan speeds and memory on the panel, and the floating readout bar.
• English and Brazilian Portuguese.

Support the project

Alien Thunder is free and stays free. If it saved you from booting into Windows just to change your keyboard colors, a donation keeps it going.

Bitcoin

EVM networks

Scan a code, or copy the address with the button at the right of its box.

Bitcoin

bc1q2nqp9d8lc0u6z7v9ag4u52sv9g9afepgyyrwu4

EVM networks: the same address on Ethereum, Optimism, BNB Chain, Gnosis, Polygon, Base, Arbitrum One, Avalanche and Unichain.

0x930CD3e9de6F2dB03709667C9799d073b34FEaCc

The same codes are in the panel widget's settings, under Support, and above the keyboard in the lighting editor, each with a Copy button.

Credits

• The lighting protocols come from alienfx-tools by T-Troll (MIT), and were checked byte for byte against alienrgb.
• The key layout comes from the Alienware Command Center's own drawing of the ABNT2 keyboard.
• G-Mode and the fan readings rely on the Linux kernel's alienware-wmi driver.
• The overlay uses KDE's LayerShellQt.

Made by Dan B. MIT license.