Adjusting Brightness on Ubuntu Desktop
Having a display that is too bright especially at night can detrimental to your enjoyment and to the health of your eyes. Unlike Ubuntu on laptops, adjusting brightness on a desktop requires more… persuasion due to the lack of control over the back-light in your monitor. Brightness adjustment on Ubuntu can be accomplished by using xrandr
Some commands require the name of the current output source which can be found using
$ xrandr | grep " connected" | cut -f1 -d " "
This will return the name of the your current output source
$ HDMI-1
Getting the current brightness can be accomplished using
$ xrandr --verbose | awk '/Brightness/ { print $2; exit }'
changing the brightness can be accomplished using
$ xrandr --output [your source] --brightness [0.0 - 1.0]
The functionality of these commands can easily be rolled into a GUI application which I have done at