Whoops, it's already been months since I last blogged. I've been actively involved with Plasma and especially its power management service PowerDevil for over a year now. I'm still learning about how everything fits together.
With both hands, I support the idea of adjusting brightness for all connected displays with a single input (personally I would use the laptop’s Fn+brightness). Thanks for working on this feature; also, thanks a lot for the tech details & reasoning in the blog post.
But also, with both hands, I support the comments of some users about having a quick & easy control for turning it off. Googling for that NO_DDC-something parameter urgently in the middle of a workday is not quick & easy It would be much frendlier to have it as a checkbox either in the brightness popup or at least in the settings.
This feedback is not about this feature only. You mention that KDE approach is “to include new features early on and tweak them over time”. Great, but then, I think, it is a must to also give the users the “quick & easy OFF” for ALL cases like this. I think more KDE users would gladly help you test features & tweak them if they would have these peace-of-mind OFF/ON toggles in friendly-to-find places. Otherwise, for example, if I set that NO_DDC-something OFF, I doubt I will frequently change it back ON anytime soon.
If this reasoning makes sense, please pass it on in the KDE team. The case with this feature is a good illustration for the more general reasoning regarding the KDE approach.
Yes, I agree wholeheartedly with this comment. Honestly, my biggest regret for 6.2 is that I didn’t revert the KWin integration for PowerDevil when the release approached and KWin’s “own the brightness of all displays” approach still had a lot of edge cases unaddressed, and still does.
That’s a learning experience for me, and if I have taken away one thing from this whole brightness rollout, then it is to assume that the regressions I’m aware of are only the tip of the iceberg, and to not rely on future improvements when deciding whether to merge a feature (even if it’s good).
Discovered this post while looking into some buggy behavior with this, wondering how I can best help. I see the “Dimming rework” issue at invent (dot) kde (dot) org/plasma/powerdevil/-/issues/38 and maybe this belongs there, but I’m not an experienced contributor so not sure how best to report this.
I have a fairly conventional dual monitor setup, both fed from the same AMD desktop graphics card, and I’m finding that (sometimes?) when returning from suspend that only one monitor is showing up in the taskbar widget.
Edit to add: Tried a few times and I think on cold boots it works correctly, but on come back from suspend it loses one of the monitors.
@brianstamper: There are some more bugfixes in 6.3 related to keeping the applet in sync, but the big improvement (due soon) will be ddcutil 2.2, due for release sometime in February. If you have the option to try out the latest release candidate, I would encourage it! Fixed more or less all display re-detection issues for me.
Having worked fleetingly with ddcutil I fully agree that it is far from easy maintaining a consistent UX when having to deal with an inconsistent variable (which quite surprisingly lives inside my screen and not in some server at the other side of the world) . In this sense I would opt for providing more rather than less information to the user given that the laggy nature of the underlying interface can not be well hidden.
I would also like to mention this thread, discussing the inconsistency of the UI of the Brightness Controls.
I really hope ddcutil 2.2 brings on some amazing improvements and solves much of your problems, but in case it doesn’t I just want to say how much I appreciate the work you’re putting in to improve on the little things.
PS:
Anyway, these kind of assumptions are what eat up a good amount of development time, as opposed to just adding new functionality. Hopefully users will find the new brightness controls worthwhile.
This is what makes for great user experience and great UX is what it is all about. There are few features that are really critical to UX but polish will always be appreciated, even if it takes some time to notice.