KDE Plasma Widget for external monitor brightness adjustment

Re:KDE Plasma Widget for external monitor brightness adjustment by alin23 on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @10:13AM (#35525459)

I develop Lunar (https://lunar.fyi/) for controlling monitors on Mac and stumbled upon this gem for Linux which I wanted to share with you.

I regularly get asked to recommend something similar to Lunar for Linux and Windows and while there's TwinkleTray for Windows, I didn't have a good recommendation for Linux. Glad this finally exists!

A lot of people also use MonitorControl for Mac and might be curious what's the difference between it and Lunar. I have a comparison table here for those people: https://lunar.fyi/lunar-vs-monitorcontrol

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Re:KDE Plasma Widget for external monitor brightness adjustment by Garcia98 on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @10:34AM (#35525743)

gddccontrol has been around for ages on Linux and it's not exclusive to a single desktop environment (and I'm sure there's a plethora of alternatives, but that's just the one I use).

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Re:KDE Plasma Widget for external monitor brightness adjustment by ChuckNorris89 on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @10:37AM (#35525786)

Linux has many such apps, but many are just CLI based, or buggy/janky af, or just don't work at all, depending on what HW you have.

Having a great looking app the integrates seamlessly into your DE and justworks(TM) is big step in the linux world.

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Re:KDE Plasma Widget for external monitor brightness adjustment by Garcia98 on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @11:06AM (#35526203)

Sure, but gddccontrol has a GUI, has been supported since 2004 and works fine in 2023, that's why I find it a bit odd that he didn't know what to recommend to Linux users until now.

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Re:KDE Plasma Widget for external monitor brightness adjustment by pohuing on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @11:32AM (#35526570)

Maybe because it's discoverability is bad. I've been looking for something to control screen brightness because I wanted to give Linux another shot, so this random post was a lucky find.

If I look for this topic on ddg I either find a Ubuntu wiki entry(not really relevant to me on suse with KDE), the arch Wiki which focuses solely on technical details and clis. The first ten articles are clis, a lot of them truly strange ones like writing magic numbers into random system files.

Not a single mention of gddc tho, and the manpage is not a very good advertisement either...

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Re:KDE Plasma Widget for external monitor brightness adjustment by chronogram on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @01:54PM (#35528685)

Second Google result for me is the GitHub repository with clear information. You're making a mountain out of a molehill.

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Re:KDE Plasma Widget for external monitor brightness adjustment by alin23 on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @11:13AM (#35526302)

I knew about gddccontrol, it's just not what people were looking for when they were asking me about an alternative to Lunar. I obviously gave them any alternative I could find, but all the responses I got were that a simpler easily reachable UI and keyboard shortcuts for changing brightness were what they expected.

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Re:KDE Plasma Widget for external monitor brightness adjustment by bee_rider on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @03:46PM (#35530458)

> Therefore I don't get your outrage on people promoting this other app. You are free to keep using gddccontrol, the existence of other similar apps doesn't mean gddccontrol will stop working for you.

Just a note — “outrage” describes a state of extreme agitation, it is probably not accurate to use it to describe the post you’ve responded to.

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Re:KDE Plasma Widget for external monitor brightness adjustment by ChuckNorris89 on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @10:23AM (#35525591)

>there's TwinkleTray for Windows

For Windows I fiind ClickMonitorDDC[1] is a great app as it has more configuration options, and also lets you control other parameters such as volume, contrast, RGB, color profiles, etc., and also lets you control these individually via the mouse wheels scrolling over the tray icons, which for me is a must have UX wise.

[1] https://github.com/chrismah/ClickMonitorDDC7.2

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Re:KDE Plasma Widget for external monitor brightness adjustment by alin23 on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @10:27AM (#35525644)

Yes, that one is really good as well and I recommend it for more advanced use cases like setting manufacturer specific VCPs (e.g. E9 to 36 for PBP on Dells etc.)

But most people ask me for a Lunar alternative which by that they mean a pretty UI with some adaptive or automated brightness. That's why I usually recommend TwinkleTray.

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Re:KDE Plasma Widget for external monitor brightness adjustment by janjones on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @10:50AM (#35525983)

> there's TwinkleTray for Windows

There is also Monitorian for Windows:

https://github.com/emoacht/Monitorian

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Re:KDE Plasma Widget for external monitor brightness adjustment by lloeki on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @11:23AM (#35526435)

I've user Lunar for quite a while, then moved to MonitorControl, and am now on BetterDisplay, which notably includes DDC/CI over the M1 HDMI ports.

Also its ability to fake screens of arbitrary resolutions e.g for headless machines is solid gold.

https://github.com/waydabber/BetterDisplay

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Re:KDE Plasma Widget for external monitor brightness adjustment by alin23 on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @11:29AM (#35526534)

Yes, BetterDisplay got DDC support on HDMI M1 soon after its dev learned that I added it in Lunar: https://github.com/waydabber/BetterDisplay/issues/1361

I’m friends with Istvan (the BetterDisplay dev) from the time he was a Lunar user, and we usually share implementation details for non-Pro features.

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Re:KDE Plasma Widget for external monitor brightness adjustment by lloeki on Wednesday April 12, 2023 @06:32AM (#35537509)

I must concur with sibling comment by sausajez, and say thank you for sharing knowledge and code between the "competing" projects! I feel like everyone is better off this way.

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Re:KDE Plasma Widget for external monitor brightness adjustment by sausajez on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @03:20PM (#35530029)

Can I just say... such a healthy way to help the ecosystem but retain distinguishing features

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Re:KDE Plasma Widget for external monitor brightness adjustment by nierro on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @02:11PM (#35528905)

There is also Clight (https://github.com/FedeDP/Clight) if you want automatic backlight adjusting given ambient brightness. It supports external monitors through ddcutil C library and has many more features to offer. Disclaimer: i am its creator ;)

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Re:KDE Plasma Widget for external monitor brightness adjustment by nierro on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @03:50PM (#35530526)

It is Linux only btw.

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Re:KDE Plasma Widget for external monitor brightness adjustment by miduil on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @05:49PM (#35532071)

I've tried setting up clight on various occasions and now gave it a shot again, whilst I appreciate all the documentation I'm still struggling to get it working on NixOS with swaywm on a laptop. I'm primarily interested in adjusting screen brightness based on my webcam. I'm already using redshift/gammastep.

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Re:KDE Plasma Widget for external monitor brightness adjustment by nierro on Wednesday April 12, 2023 @02:37AM (#35535803)

Uh that's sad! There is actually an issue opened about NixOS; but, since I am not using it, it's pretty hard for me to debug. If you want some help you can comment on that issue though!

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Re:KDE Plasma Widget for external monitor brightness adjustment by miduil on Wednesday April 12, 2023 @02:34PM (#35544557)

Thanks! Totally overlooked that. I've managed getting through the first hurdles last night, I'll leave some more feedback on GitHub :).

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Re:KDE Plasma Widget for external monitor brightness adjustment by inconceivable on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @04:33PM (#35531160)

random question for you: i have a sony oled display that auto-dims on low color change activity (this is impossible to disable - believe me, i've tried, even in the diagnostics menu). do you have any idea how this could possibly be circumvented?

Thanks!

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Re:KDE Plasma Widget for external monitor brightness adjustment by alin23 on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @05:14PM (#35531654)

That is an ABL or Automatic Brightness Limiter and it’s one of the things that’s messing Lunar’s brightness Sync algorithm because the max brightness is constantly changing.

It might be possible to disable from the monitor hidden service menu, if you can find a way to enter it. But it will also greatly decrease the lifespan of the diodes as OLEDs are not made to go so long with high brightness and heat.

If the monitor does not provide such an option, there is no way to circumvent this as the function is embedded in the monitor firmware.

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Re:KDE Plasma Widget for external monitor brightness adjustment by inconceivable on Tuesday April 11, 2023 @09:24PM (#35533906)

thanks for the info. i also tried in the hidden service menu, no dice.

psa to all others out there, just watch out for this feature in oleds if it's a dealbreaker. otherwise i love this display as a monitor. for me it's not that big of a deal for the price i paid.

btw even my studio monitor speakers do this with no ability to disable... seems like a trend in major electronics these days.

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