Dear KDE Community and Developers,
I am writing to report a significant degradation in user experience regarding keyboard backlight color control, which appeared approximately two weeks ago following a Plasma update. I am currently running Arch Linux with the latest versions of KDE and Plasma.
I use a Logitech G510 keyboard, and traditionally, its backlight brightness and color are controlled via the following commands:
echo 255 | sudo tee /sys/class/leds/g15::kbd_backlight/brightness
echo "255 255 255" | sudo tee /sys/class/leds/g15::kbd_backlight/multi_intensity
A recent update introduced a new feature that was enabled by default. This feature, which automatically changes the keyboard’s backlight color, can be found in the same menu as the monitor brightness settings – the sun-like icon near the clock.
This change has been incredibly frustrating. For two weeks, I was unable to locate where this “nasty” (for lack of a better word) function was hidden. It repeatedly forced my keyboard backlight to turn blue twice upon system startup (I assume this blue is one of the primary accent colors of my current theme). I even had to write multiple scripts to try and counteract Plasma’s persistent attempts to “ruin my life” by imposing an undesirable keyboard color scheme! I went as far as creating a guide on GitHub to help others fight against this behavior. Only yesterday, purely by accident, did I discover the setting to fix this within Plasma’s configuration panel.
I kindly request that, at a minimum, the “Keyboard color - based on accent color” option be disabled by default in future installations and updates.
Furthermore, a more beneficial improvement would be to provide the ability to directly select and set the RGB backlight color from within this very menu. This would be a genuinely useful feature. The current implementation, unfortunately, feels like a detrimental change to the user experience.
My apologies if this message comes across as overly harsh, but this single option caused me several days of unexpected and unnecessary work to resolve. I also follow KDE news sites and did not see any prior announcement about this specific change.
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
Sincerely,
Somnodeus