Unsure if bug - screen brightness control in "brightness and color" widget intermittently doesn't show up in 6.2.3

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I’m unsure if this is a bug or not, or if it is known already so I’m making this thread in case anyone else has this happening.

I’m using arch/endeavouros with plasma 6.2.3, frameworks 6.7.0(Edit: updated to 6.8.0, no change), Qt 6.8.0, and kernel 6.11.6 and using wayland session. After updating to plasma 6.2.3 this week the screen brightness control slider under the Brightness and Color widget only shows up sometimes. This didn’t happen in 6.2.2 or earlier going back to sometime in the 6.1 series when I did this install (in mid September). Before this (in 6.2.2 and earlier) it showed properly up every login. I use the slider to change my screen’s brightness every day and never saw it not show up.

I’m using a laptop (Asus vivobook f1504), intel only system with no AMD or nvidia if that matters, and the slider is for the internal screen. I don’t use this computer with any external displays either.

Also, if I use the keyboard shortcut to change the brightness (for me this is fn+f4 and f5) the OSD shows up in the middle of the screen telling me what brightness % I am at. I only mention this because there is a separate bug I have noticed (which is already in the bug tracker) where the keyboard backlight brightness slider does not show up under the Brightness and Color widget until after logging out and back in. In that bug, the OSD doesn’t show up in addition to the slider in the widget, even though the keyboard shortcuts still are able to change the brightness. In addition, I can’t figure out how to make this bug repeatable. By that I mean sometimes the screen brightness slider shows up right away after booting, but sometimes it takes a few logout/logins to get it to show, sometimes it only takes one, sometimes it takes two… just wanna make sure this isn’t just me before filing a bug report so I don’t waste anyone’s time.

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Plasma 6.2.3 / Frameworks 6.7.0 / Qt 6.8.0 on 6.11.8-1 (Tumbleweed Slowroll).

On a desktop with two screens that show up fine on ddcutil detect and are fully controllable via the vdu_controls GUI tool.

The Brightness and Color widget does not show the screen brightness controls when I log in. Only if I remove the widget and then add it again, do the screen controls show up in the widget and then their brightness can be adjusted.

So, +1 from me on this.

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I didn’t think to do this. That fixes it for me if the slider isn’t showing up. I have the widget as “always shown” and switching it to disabled and back is what I did. Of course this is per login but now at least one thing is reproducible. Thanks for the input, I might go ahead and put this in the bug tracker since I’m not the only one who has this.

Edit: found this which looks similar 488915 – Standalone Brightness and Color widget breaks after reboot

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For me, the brightness control for the laptop screen always shows, but the external screen DDC brightness control sometimes doesn’t show.

I’ll check about the disabling/enabling trick if it happens again, though I don’t recall seeing this issue since I updated to 6.2.4.

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Actually, it just happened again, and using System Tray Settings → Entries to disable the Brightness and Color widget and then enable it again - did not help.

What did help was restarting powerdevil (by running systemctl --user restart plasma-powerdevil.service), after which I got the two sliders in the brightness and color widget - that each controls one screen, but they were both labeled “Built-in Screen” and the order was the reverse of what it usually does.

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