Hey! Happy KDE and Plasma user here. I just upgraded to Plasma 6 and suddenly, when using the hardware keys on my Dell laptop to adjust screen brightness, not just the laptop screen brightness changes as I would expect, but the brightness of all monitors. This is very unfortunate, as I hardly ever want to change the external monitor’s brightness (they are stationary, after all), but the laptop’s all the time. Having them coupled by default is terrible UX (for me). What’s more, the brightness control on those external (Sasmsung) monitors isn’t even real! Meaning: It doesn’t reduce power consumption, it just makes the screen content “more black”. Is that a bug? I can’t believe this could be intended behaviour?! Is there any way to get the Plasma 5 behaviour back, where I can just control the laptop’s (real) brightness directly?
I believe your laptop is designed to use the brightness keys and disabling the brightness control in KDE will only affect your external monitors.
There is an easy way to disable it. I can’t remember how, maybe someone will post it. But you can probably search this
forum and find it. I’m pretty sure that I read it here.
Here it is.
hi, welcome
it sounds like a bug, or incomplete feature set.
in the meantime…
from my notes:
# to keep brightness levels from changing, disable brightness control slider in system tray
systemctl --user edit plasma-powerdevil.service
# add these two lines to the file that opens
[Service]
Environment=POWERDEVIL_NO_DDCUTIL=1
# save and logout
# to reverse, just delete the directory created at
~/.config/systemd/user/plasma-powerdevil.service.d
# add this package for stand alone GUI control of monitor settings
gddccontrol
Hmm, I tried this method, but that just disables the function key for brightness control entirely. I do still want it to work, only just for the built-in monitor
did you try the GUI package without the change, then?
reverse the change, and just use the GUI to control the screen brightness individually for the external monitor and see if they conflict.