Bug 502122

Summary:	Automatic Display Brightness on hardware with a light sensor
Product:	[Plasma] plasmashell	Reporter:	Tobias G. <kde-bugzilla.oink169>
Component:	Power management & brightness	Assignee:	Plasma Bugs List <plasma-bugs-null>
Status:	CONFIRMED ---
Severity:	wishlist	CC:	evgeniyharchenko.dev, kdebugs, mel, nate
Priority:	NOR
Version First Reported In:	6.3.3
Target Milestone:	1.0
Platform:	openSUSE
OS:	Linux
Latest Commit:		Version Fixed/Implemented In:
Sentry Crash Report:

Description Tobias G. 2025-03-28 11:32:00 UTC

SUMMARY
I own a Framework 13 AMD and on GNOME, automatic display brightness worked oob. It would be great if KDE supported it as well. There are 3rd-party tools like https://github.com/mikhail-m1/illuminanced that might work (manually writing to /sys/class/backlight/amdgpu_bl1/brightness works), but I haven't tested it yet.
It would be great if KDE could detect the sensor and adapt screen brightness automatically.

STEPS TO REPRODUCE
1. own laptop with light sensor
2. change environemnt
3. observe

OBSERVED RESULT
screen brightness doesn't change

EXPECTED RESULT
screen brightness changes based on illumination of the environment

SOFTWARE/OS VERSIONS
Operating System: Yuga Linux 20250326
KDE Plasma Version: 6.3.3
KDE Frameworks Version: 6.12.0
Qt Version: 6.8.2
Kernel Version: 6.13.7-1-yuga (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: Wayland
Processors: 16 × AMD Ryzen 7 7840U w/ Radeon  780M Graphics
Memory: 30.7 GiB of RAM
Graphics Processor: AMD Radeon 780M
Manufacturer: Framework
Product Name: Laptop 13 (AMD Ryzen 7040Series)
System Version: A7

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
While this is Yuga Linux, it uses openSUSE Tumbleweed repos and packages

Comment 1 Nate Graham 2025-03-28 23:36:13 UTC

I'm surprised not to find an existing bug report for this!

Comment 2 Melanie Scheirer 2025-11-26 14:55:39 UTC

I also got a FW13 and ran into this. I think a general ability to do dynamic display brightness would be cool so over the holidays when I have some free time I'll dig into how night color is doing it and try to wire this up.

My first pass idea would be to rework the kcm and plasmoid to show slider bars for brightness and color temperature and have toggles for automatic brightness and color temp. In the config menu you would have separated picker for doing dynamic brightness and color temperature with off, by location (auto or manual), or by light sensor (when available) and each has a bar for setting the night and day brightness and color temp.

If a user has auto on and manually sets the brightness or color temp in the widget it toggles off auto until they toggle it back on, at which point the brightness auto-adjusts again. Is there color language in the design guide to indicate a tweakable bar setting is in "automatic" by its color? The other option is to require auto be turned off by the toggle before being able to change the settings but that seems obtuse.

Maybe add a button to do unified brightness vs per-display brightness / color temp, right now color temp is all screens but brightness is per screen. Unified brightness is harder because not all screens support DDC and different models have different brightness ranges but that already happens with color temp and nobodys really complained from what I've seen about it being unified.

Likewise re: setting manual brightness / color temp, maybe a timeout setting in the settings for resuming automatic mode that could be like in an hour or next day. Seems really niche to add a timer event just for that though.