Automatically control monitor's backlight brightness with sunset/sunrise times of location (i.e Upgrade to Night Light)

Brainstorm
1

I spent 10 total hour trying to find/troubleshoot a software that does exactly this for Linux (i used Solar Screen Brightness on Windows 11, witch didn’t work on Arch because of DDCCI driver bug), and after searching A LOT (Even made a Reddit post trying to find an alternative ) , i found exactly zero programs/daemons to do this (automatically adjust the monitor brightness on sunset or sunrises, witch is calculated using my location, that means no light sensors or active GPS). Here’s a list of programs i tried:

Solar Screen Brightness - Does exactly what i want, but isn’t easily installable on Arch AND because DDCCI driver for Linux didn’t work for me (after 6 hours of troubleshooting, i gave up)

Gammastep - Does what i want (although it changes the monitor brightness using gamma instead of backlight). Doesn’t work because uses wlroots protocol, which isn’t supported by Kwin.

All the others (wluma, redshift etc..) only adjust gamma (color temperature), not brightness :(

Then i realized KDE Plasma has 90% of the things this feature needs already implemented, and it should be SOOO easy to implement it, so i made:

My Feature Request:

Add a feature/setting in Night Light to use the calculations of sunset/sunrise to automatically change the monitor backlight brightness, which should be REALLY easy, since the two things have already been implemented in Plasma: the sunset/sunrise is already calculated for Night Shift’s gamma control and the monitor can be controlled using the DDCCI slider in System Settings > Display & Monitor > Display Configuration.

This is would be SOOO useful for people like me that have their setup facing a big window and need to constantly adjust brightness in the morning (so they can actually see the monitor, because of the amount of light from the window) and in the evening (so the eyes don’t hurt because of the contrast from the night sky and the bright monitor).

I’m open to brainstorm more about this idea, or maybe someone knows about a program that works on Arch (wayland/Kwin), because I haven’t!

1 Like
2

+1 for this feature request. I also always wondered why Night Light has sunrise/sunset scheduling but brightness doesn’t, it’s been bugging me too so I made a rudimentary script you can add as a cron job to automate brightness setting (see my Codeberg on my profile, as it seems I can’t post links with a fresh account here), perhaps you and others will find it useful while we wait for native brightness scheduling support in Plasma.

3