Adjusting Brightness on Ubuntu Desktop

JADEN ARCENEAUX
1 min readApr 1, 2020

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

https://github.com/Jadens-arc/Built-In-Sunglasses

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