I have experienced a recent weird issue on KDE Plasma 6.3 where the screen brightness controls disappear in the Brightness and Color applet in the system tray. I noticed this behavior when Plasma would turn off the screens as part of the power saving settings.
This is rather annoying because it leaves the monitors dimmed and although I don’t generally keep them in a state that is bright to begin with, 10% illumination is only good late at night when the sun is down and with the lights off.
Thankfully, I did find a solution, thanks to a post on the EndeavourOS community forum.
https://forum.endeavouros.com/t/monitor-brightness-option-not-shown/63751/4
It also came with a bonus tool I have yet to really dig into but for the sake of keeping this post to the point. Should you find a situation where there are monitors missing in your Brightness and Color applet, like this:
The Solution
It is as simple as running this command in the terminal:
systemctl --user restart plasma-powerdevil.serviceAfter just a few moments the plasma powerdevil service will come back up and your monitors will once again be available for you to adjust as needed:
My Plasma world is happy again. I was getting rather annoyed with restating my computer or my session to allow me to adjust the brightness again on my monitors but just a little web-digging and the answer has been presented. What a wonderful thing about Linux and open source communities sharing their challenges and experiences.
Final Thoughts
I am not exactly sure when this became a problem. It is certainly annoying but not the end of the world. It probably would not affect most people who are more reasonable with their monitor count. It is also curious that the Built-in Screen didn’t have this issue but most of the external screens did. It is also curious to see that the one DisplayLink screen, through my Dell DisplayLink module also didn’t lose the ability to adjust brightness. Just those screens that are attached through USB-C ports / dock station.
Regardless of this slight bump in my desktop-road. I am extremely happy with how Plasma is shaping up and the day in and day out user experience I get on openSUSE Tumbleweed. I am excited when another round of updates trickle down and I can play with the new software toys.
References
https://forum.endeavouros.com/t/monitor-brightness-option-not-shown/63751/4
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