Power profiles are adjusting my screen's gamma. How can I stop it from happening?

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So what I’m noticing is that KDE is, without warning or any way to control it from settings, adjusting my laptop’s brigtness down and trying to tweak the gamma(?) to compensate. This is painfully obvious, especially in Power Saver, and I absolutely cannot leave it enabled as it undermines the display’s color accuracy entirely. I have already disabled screen brightness adjustment & dimming after inactivity but the effect remains.

I am using Plasma 6.4.

KDE is doing SOMETHING under the hood that really needs to be made transparent to the user and configurable in settings. Any advice on how to disable it would be appreciated.

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I have figured out I can override whatever is happening by installing TLP and setting the following lines in /etc/tlp.conf:

AMDGPU_ABM_LEVEL_ON_AC=0
AMDGPU_ABM_LEVEL_ON_BAT=0

then enabling the service via sudo systemctl enable --now tlp.

But that introduces the problem of stripping GUI-based power profile control from Plasma completely.

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No, it is not. Power profiles daemon is messing with the display, which I’ve also argued against on many occasions… and which also has been turned off by default. You’re probably just using an outdated version of ppd.

You can globally disable abm with a kernel boot argument, iirc amdgpu.abm_level=0

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I am running an up-to-date Fedora 42 install, so definitely not due to outdated packages…

I wonder if this is a side effect of forcefully reinstalling every dnf package because I was at a loss for other means to fix sddm (see my other post)… I did only notice this happening after getting that fixed.

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Hmm, I checked and Fedora 42 does have ppd 0.30, which should have it disabled by default. It might be worth creating an issue for ppd about it.

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Did some more digging myself, and Fedora does not use ppd by default, it uses tuned-ppd.

I copied the balanced, balanced-battery, and powersave profiles from /usr/lib/tuned/profiles to /etc/tuned/profiles as recommended by the tuned-ppd documentation (versions in /etc/tuned/profiles override the defaults installed to /usr/lib/tuned/profiles by the package), changing the parameter panel_power_savings to 0. That has fixed the issue for me while running what Fedora ships out of the box.

Didn’t even have to reboot; the next time I shifted profiles it picked up on the overriding profile in /etc/tuned/profiles.