Possible solutions for laptop/notebook brightness control issues

Users find laptop/notebook brightness control not working as expected.

There is a commonly reported problem for many Linux distributions including OpenMandriva: users find laptop/notebook brightness control not working as expected.

Hardware manufacturers have created to many different ways to control laptop/notebook brightness controls so there is no one configuration that works for all.

Currently we know 3 workarounds that user could try.
These all involve changing something on the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT line in the file /etc/default/grub.

First save a backup copy of the original file, so you can go back to that if you need to:

sudo cp /etc/default/grub /etc/default/grub.bak

Then:

  1. Change
    acpi_backlight=vendor
    to
    acpi_backlight=native

then save the file and run
sudo update-grub2
and reboot.
This one is perhaps the most common “fix” for users with this issue.

  1. Change
    acpi_backlight=vendor
    to
    acpi_backlight=video

then save the file and run
sudo update-grub2
and reboot.

  1. Remove this
    acpi_osi=Linux acpi_osi='!Windows 2012' acpi_backlight=vendor

then save the file and run
sudo update-grub2
and reboot.


  1. There is also an experimental package available for testing

sudo dnf install udev-backlight
Then reboot

  1. Set brightness from terminal (Konsole) using xrandr command.

To find the name of your screen display, run:

$ xrandr -q

On this notebook it is “LVDS-1” other possible valures could be VGA-1, HDMI-1, or DP-1 or something similar to those. There may be other possible values.

Next the brightness value must be between 0.0 to 1.0 where 0.0 refers the dimmest (full black) and 1.0 refers the brightest value. For example, to set screen brightness value as 0.6, run:

$ xrandr --output LVDS-1 --brightness 0.6

To go back to normal brightness, run:

$ xrandr --output LVDS-1 --brightness 1.0

  1. One can do one’s own internet search and find other ways to set laptop screen brightness from terminal (Konsole). One may possibly find other permanent solutions I have missed, if so please let me know.

(post updated 2022-10-10T22:00:00Z)

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Credits: @ben79

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