SUMMARY Setting the screen brightness to "0" still keeps on the display brightness at the minimal brightness (kinda low light). In Plasma 5, setting the screen brightness to zero (0) completely turns off the display backlight. However, in Plasma 6.0 and above (right now I'm on 6.3.2), even at zero brightness, the backlight remains visible at its minimum level. I hope you guys bring back the previous behavior in future updates.However, there is a workaround, I use a shortcut key to turn off the screen completely whenever needed. But this is quite annoying because when I increase the screen brightness, it restores the previous brightness level instead of starting from zero. I prefer it to increase from 0 to 1, 2, and so on, just like in Plasma 5. Please bring back the behaviour of screen brightness from plasma 5 which completely turns off the backlight of the display. Plasma 6 is really great but this one spoils my user experience. For this issue I had to move to kubuntu 24.04 LTS which runs on plasma 5.27.12 but I'm badly missing the plasma 6 features. STEPS TO REPRODUCE Turn off/low (-) the screen brightness using brightness key from the laptop to 0% OBSERVED RESULT Display/Screen brightness still visible at 0% (kinda low light) EXPECTED RESULT Display/Screen brightness must be turned off completely at 0% (like a shutdown computer) which is working fine in plasma 5.27.XX but not after plasma 6. SOFTWARE/OS VERSIONS Linux/KDE Plasma: Fedora 41 KDE Spin KDE Plasma Version: 6.3.2 KDE Frameworks Version: 6.11.0 Qt Version: 6.8.2
At some point in the past we made this change intentionally, and I don't remember if we reverted it due to complaints. So depending on whether we did, this is either intentional, or a bug. :) In the meantime, can you help explain why you want the backlight to go all the way off this way? Why not just turn the screen via keyboard shortcut?
(In reply to Nate Graham from comment #1) > At some point in the past we made this change intentionally, and I don't > remember if we reverted it due to complaints. So depending on whether we > did, this is either intentional, or a bug. :) This is intentional, we did not revert it. People were complaining about not being able to reduce their monitors to 0 brightness despite this not turning them off; we resolved this by requiring minimum 1 brightness only for built-in screens. IIRC in a discussion with Xaver Hugl he suggested that allowing minimum 0 could be added back as a "quirk" checkbox option in System Settings -> Display Configuration. All of the prior discussions were centered around allowing users to pick their minimum brightness value that's still visible. At no point, however, was there talk about specifically turning the display off deliberately using brightness keys. > In the meantime, can you help explain why you want the backlight to go all > the way off this way? Why not just turn the screen via keyboard shortcut? Not the OP, but looking at my Fn-row keys, none of them is a clear "turn off screen" button. The brightness keys on the other hand are immediately clear to everyone. My question in terms of UX would be: if a screen is turned off, should it even be part of the screen geometry? i.e. does it make sense to allow interactions and pointer movement on a screen that we know is fully invisible? If I disable a screen in Display Configuration, Plasma will move my panel and open windows to the next available screen instead. But if we do this in response to brightness keys, I think it would feel more jarring and unexpected. On the other hand, if we don't do it, we leave an area of the desktop literally unusable and that seems like bad design. The "Turn off screen" action in System Settings -> Keyboard -> Shortcuts is temporary and applies to all screens. Whenever user input is detected, the screen comes back again (at its previous brightness, as noted in Comment #0). This is different from the behavior we had in Plasma 5.x and prevents making the desktop unusable. Probably the best way to satisfy this request, but won't work well with brightness keys applying to multiple screens at the same time. At the very least we'll want this MR to land first: https://invent.kde.org/plasma/powerdevil/-/merge_requests/527 So I think we have two ways that this user's request could be solved: One by introducing the quirk option in Display Configuration catering to users for whom brightness 0 does not mean turned off. And Aravind could use it to make it work on this particular laptop that interprets brightness 0 as fully off. The other one by merging the aforementioned MR so that the brightness key only affects the active display. Then if the brightness is already at 0% for that display, make the next brightness key press turn it off temporarily until the next user input (a.k.a. "DPMS" action in powerdevil). Possibly require an extra key press after displaying "Press again to turn off screen" in the OSD.
(In reply to Nate Graham from comment #1) > At some point in the past we made this change intentionally, and I don't > remember if we reverted it due to complaints. So depending on whether we > did, this is either intentional, or a bug. :) > > In the meantime, can you help explain why you want the backlight to go all > the way off this way? Why not just turn the screen via keyboard shortcut? Well Keyboard shortcut is a workaround but thats not working as what I expected.. For eg. If I accidentally clicked any keyboard key ..the screen brightness increases/returned back to the previous brightness stage before where i triggered the shortkey to turn it off. I mostly use text to speech on my docs for my research stuffs to save up some time while I'm working on other things especially on my way to hometown during weekends thats a 6 hour travel and turning the screen off save me up some battery backup on my laptop (not that great but yeah atleast better than turning it completely on wholetime during travel)
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🐛🧹 This bug has been in NEEDSINFO status with no change for at least 30 days. Closing as RESOLVED WORKSFORME.