I've found that shelling out to the ddcutil CLI directly tends to be "lossy" - as in, if invoked very quickly (i.e. via keyboard shortcuts), it will tend to race with itself and fail half the time. So far the best solution I've found is to run a daemon to queue and batch together multiple operations, which significantly improved reliability.
KDE Plasma Widget for external monitor brightness adjustment
31–40 of 65 posts
Re: KDE Plasma Widget for external monitor brightness adjustment
#32Neat! I'm working on something very similar for Xfce, but invoking ddcutil natively: https://github.com/apsun/xfce4-ddc-plugin (very much WIP, currently only supports hotkeys and a single monitor) I've found that shelling out to the ddcutil CLI directly tends to be "lossy" - as in, if invoked very quickly (i.e. via keyboard shortcuts), it will tend to race with itself and fail half the time. So far the best solution…
I wonder if a desktop-independent ddcutil daemon makes sense.
Re: KDE Plasma Widget for external monitor brightness adjustment
#33Oh I'm definitely trying this. I currently have kb shortcuts defined for brightness up/down that invoke ddcutil. This really ought to be built into every OS. From what I've read, the catch is that DDC implementations are often very buggy and can cause problems, so it would be risky to do this out of the box.
My Samsung, for example, supports DDC/CI for HDMI but not DisplayPort, so I have to choose between software control and a refresh rate higher than 60Hz. It also only supports a small subset of commands and doesn’t work if the device sending the command isn’t the active display input.
I wanted to build a small utility that switches from my work PC to home PC automatically after 5pm, but all those compromises make it a very tedious process.
Re: KDE Plasma Widget for external monitor brightness adjustment
#34I just found it, and I have to restart KDE to see if it worked, so no certainty here yet :)
Re: KDE Plasma Widget for external monitor brightness adjustment
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
In what sense is it supported? What functionality is exposed to end users?
Automatic detection of default and supported resolutions and information about DPI? Or is it not the same?
Re: KDE Plasma Widget for external monitor brightness adjustment
#36Oh I'm definitely trying this. I currently have kb shortcuts defined for brightness up/down that invoke ddcutil. This really ought to be built into every OS. From what I've read, the catch is that DDC implementations are often very buggy and can cause problems, so it would be risky to do this out of the box.
I’d love a database of monitors with good DDC/CI support. You can’t just assume a good or high end monitor will work as you want it to. My Samsung, for example, supports DDC/CI for HDMI but not DisplayPort, so I have to choose between software control and a refresh rate higher than 60Hz. It also only supports a small subset of commands and doesn’t work if the device sending the command isn’t the active display input.…
It's not curated or anything like that because DDC can be affected by more than just the monitor itself (adapters/hubs/docks/GPU etc.) but you can run some statistics to see what specific monitors support DDC for most people.
For example, here's a query you can run to find the monitors that are most likely to support DDC:
SELECT
regexp_replace("name", ' \(\d+\)$', '') AS name,
count(ddc) working_ddc_count,
connection,
"DisplayProductID",
"isHiDPI"
FROM
displays
WHERE
ddc
AND NOT "kCGDisplayIsVirtualDevice"
AND NOT "isAirPlayDisplay"
AND NOT "isTV"
AND "DisplayProductID" != 0
AND "DisplayVendorID" NOT IN(7789, 1552) -- Filter out LGs as they don't have a useful name and Apple displays
AND name NOT LIKE 'Unknown Display%' -- Filter out those in a semi-connected state
GROUP BY
name,
"DisplayProductID",
connection,
"isHiDPI"
ORDER BY
working_ddc_count DESC;Re: KDE Plasma Widget for external monitor brightness adjustment
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, but gddccontrol has a GUI, has been supported since 2004 and works fine in 2023, that's why I find it a bit odd that he didn't know what to recommend to Linux users until now.
Maybe because it's discoverability is bad. I've been looking for something to control screen brightness because I wanted to give Linux another shot, so this random post was a lucky find. If I look for this topic on ddg I either find a Ubuntu wiki entry(not really relevant to me on suse with KDE), the arch Wiki which focuses solely on technical details and clis. The first ten articles are clis, a lot of them truly str…
Re: KDE Plasma Widget for external monitor brightness adjustment
#38I develop Lunar ( https://lunar.fyi/ ) for controlling monitors on Mac and stumbled upon this gem for Linux which I wanted to share with you. I regularly get asked to recommend something similar to Lunar for Linux and Windows and while there's TwinkleTray for Windows, I didn't have a good recommendation for Linux. Glad this finally exists! A lot of people also use MonitorControl for Mac and might be curious what's th…
Re: KDE Plasma Widget for external monitor brightness adjustment
#39If your distro doesn't have a package for the backend of this plasmoid yet, it invokes the backend with[1]: python3 -m ddcci_plasmoid_backend So you can probably get away with this: git clone https://github.com/davidhi7/ddcci-plasmoid \ && cd $(python3 -c "import site; print(site.getsitepackages()[0])") \ && ln -s $(cd -)/ddcci-plasmoid/backend/ddcci_plasmoid_backend . [1]: https://github.com/davidhi7/ddcci-plasmoid/…
Re: KDE Plasma Widget for external monitor brightness adjustment
#40Debian in particular has the ddcci-dkms package that once installed should solve the entire problem and let you control external monitors the same way you control internal ones. I just found it, and I have to restart KDE to see if it worked, so no certainty here yet :)