Currently using Ubuntu variants with Gnome3 as the default shell on all my workstations. Curiously, for laptops, the brightness control is always there.
I’m assuming that Gnome is somehow detecting the device has a battery that needs power management.
My issue here is that the brightness control is never visible for desktop PCs.
Any particular reason for that? Is it possible to enable this brightness control for any standard desktop PC? The obvious choice is to use tools like xrandr to adjust the brightness manually. But, seriously, I am actually tired of improvising ad-hoc scripts and installing 3rd party plugins for a feature that is clearly available in the native shell.
I don’t see the link between battery/power management and brightness control really, apart from the extra spared energy when dimming down the screen brightness. I suppose it doesn’t show because either your graphics card/monitor doesn’t support it, or the driver doesn’t support it. It’s like if you have no audio device, then you won’t get the volume slider.
But, seriously? Controlling the display brightness has nothing to do with saving battery on a portable device?
Obviously that won’t be the case for a desktop PC, but controlling brightnes is a dead given feature to any monitor these days. It seems more like Gnome is deliberately choosing not to show the brightness control because it presumes there is no need to have that option on a desktop PC. In a way, it makes sense.
But controlling display brightness, IMO, goes beyond just saving battery on laptops.
Like I said, I can use any other tool, like xrandr, to manually adjust the brightness of my monitors. Hence, it would be logical do give users the choice to always do that without resorting to ad-hoc scripts and 3rd party apps or extensions.
Only if the underlying hardware allows it—which isn’t always the case on any given display. Additionally, even if the display allowed the OS to control the brightness, the graphics driver and/or the kernel needs to expose that control.
GNOME by itself doesn’t do anything special: it shows what the underlying OS provides.
