Meeting (BOF) at Plumbers Dublin to discuss backlight brightness as connector object property RFC?

[Simon Ser]

On Friday, September 9th, 2022 at 12:23, Hans de Goede <hdegoede at redhat.com> wrote:

> "people using
> non fully integrated desktop environments like e.g. sway often use custom
> scripts binded to hotkeys to get functionality like the brightness
> up/down keyboard hotkeys changing the brightness. This typically involves
> e.g. the xbacklight utility.
> 
> Even if the xbacklight utility is ported to use kms with the new connector
> object brightness properties then this still will not work because
> changing the properties will require drm-master rights and e.g. sway will
> already hold those."

I don't think this is a good argument. Sway (which I'm a maintainer of)
can add a command to change the backlight, and then users can bind their
keybinding to that command. This is not very different from e.g. a
keybind to switch on/off a monitor.

We can also standardize a protocol to change the backlight across all
non-fully-integrated desktop environments (would be a simple addition
to output-power-management [1]), so that a single tool can work for
multiple compositors.

Simon

[1]: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wlroots/wlr-protocols/-/issues/114