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Comment by alin23 | Hacker News Reader

I develop Lunar (https://lunar.fyi/) for controlling monitors on Mac and stumbled upon this gem for Linux which I wanted to share with you.

I regularly get asked to recommend something similar to Lunar for Linux and Windows and while there's TwinkleTray for Windows, I didn't have a good recommendation for Linux. Glad this finally exists!

A lot of people also use MonitorControl for Mac and might be curious what's the difference between it and Lunar. I have a comparison table here for those people: https://lunar.fyi/lunar-vs-monitorcontrol

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There is also Clight (https://github.com/FedeDP/Clight) if you want automatic backlight adjusting given ambient brightness. It supports external monitors through ddcutil C library and has many more features to offer. Disclaimer: i am its creator ;)

It is Linux only btw.

I've tried setting up clight on various occasions and now gave it a shot again, whilst I appreciate all the documentation I'm still struggling to get it working on NixOS with swaywm on a laptop. I'm primarily interested in adjusting screen brightness based on my webcam. I'm already using redshift/gammastep.

Uh that's sad! There is actually an issue opened about NixOS; but, since I am not using it, it's pretty hard for me to debug. If you want some help you can comment on that issue though!

Thanks! Totally overlooked that. I've managed getting through the first hurdles last night, I'll leave some more feedback on GitHub :).

> there's TwinkleTray for Windows

There is also Monitorian for Windows:

https://github.com/emoacht/Monitorian

I've user Lunar for quite a while, then moved to MonitorControl, and am now on BetterDisplay, which notably includes DDC/CI over the M1 HDMI ports.

Also its ability to fake screens of arbitrary resolutions e.g for headless machines is solid gold.

https://github.com/waydabber/BetterDisplay

Yes, BetterDisplay got DDC support on HDMI M1 soon after its dev learned that I added it in Lunar: https://github.com/waydabber/BetterDisplay/issues/1361

I’m friends with Istvan (the BetterDisplay dev) from the time he was a Lunar user, and we usually share implementation details for non-Pro features.

I must concur with sibling comment by sausajez, and say thank you for sharing knowledge and code between the "competing" projects! I feel like everyone is better off this way.

Can I just say... such a healthy way to help the ecosystem but retain distinguishing features

gddccontrol has been around for ages on Linux and it's not exclusive to a single desktop environment (and I'm sure there's a plethora of alternatives, but that's just the one I use).

>gddccontrol has been around for ages on Linux

Linux has many such apps, but many are just CLI based, or buggy/janky GUIs, or just don't work at all, depending on what HW/OS you run.

Having a great looking app the integrates seamlessly into your DE and justworks(TM)(hopefully) is big step in the linux world.

>but gddccontrol has a GUI, has been supported since 2004 and works fine in 2023

@Garcia98 gddccontrol GUI might have existed since whenever, and maybe it works fine for you, but for me it has been extremely buggy on Ubuntu 22.04 to the point it is unusable so I welcome other similar apps if they improve my experience.

Therefore I don't get your outrage on people promoting this other app. You are free to keep using gddccontrol, the existence of other similar apps doesn't mean gddccontrol will stop working for you.

Sure, but gddccontrol has a GUI, has been supported since 2004 and works fine in 2023, that's why I find it a bit odd that he didn't know what to recommend to Linux users until now.

I knew about gddccontrol, it's just not what people were looking for when they were asking me about an alternative to Lunar. I obviously gave them any alternative I could find, but all the responses I got were that a simpler easily reachable UI and keyboard shortcuts for changing brightness were what they expected.

Maybe because it's discoverability is bad. I've been looking for something to control screen brightness because I wanted to give Linux another shot, so this random post was a lucky find.

If I look for this topic on ddg I either find a Ubuntu wiki entry(not really relevant to me on suse with KDE), the arch Wiki which focuses solely on technical details and clis. The first ten articles are clis, a lot of them truly strange ones like writing magic numbers into random system files.

Not a single mention of gddc tho, and the manpage is not a very good advertisement either...

Second Google result for me is the GitHub repository with clear information. You're making a mountain out of a molehill.

> Therefore I don't get your outrage on people promoting this other app. You are free to keep using gddccontrol, the existence of other similar apps doesn't mean gddccontrol will stop working for you.

Just a note — “outrage” describes a state of extreme agitation, it is probably not accurate to use it to describe the post you’ve responded to.

>there's TwinkleTray for Windows

For Windows I fiind ClickMonitorDDC[1] is a great app as it has more configuration options, and also lets you control other parameters such as volume, contrast, RGB, color profiles, etc., and also lets you control these individually via the mouse wheels scrolling over the tray icons, which for me is a must have UX wise.

[1] https://github.com/chrismah/ClickMonitorDDC7.2

Yes, that one is really good as well and I recommend it for more advanced use cases like setting manufacturer specific VCPs (e.g. E9 to 36 for PBP on Dells etc.)

But most people ask me for a Lunar alternative which by that they mean a pretty UI with some adaptive or automated brightness. That's why I usually recommend TwinkleTray.

random question for you: i have a sony oled display that auto-dims on low color change activity (this is impossible to disable - believe me, i've tried, even in the diagnostics menu). do you have any idea how this could possibly be circumvented?

Thanks!

That is an ABL or Automatic Brightness Limiter and it’s one of the things that’s messing Lunar’s brightness Sync algorithm because the max brightness is constantly changing.

It might be possible to disable from the monitor hidden service menu, if you can find a way to enter it. But it will also greatly decrease the lifespan of the diodes as OLEDs are not made to go so long with high brightness and heat.

If the monitor does not provide such an option, there is no way to circumvent this as the function is embedded in the monitor firmware.

thanks for the info. i also tried in the hidden service menu, no dice.

psa to all others out there, just watch out for this feature in oleds if it's a dealbreaker. otherwise i love this display as a monitor. for me it's not that big of a deal for the price i paid.

btw even my studio monitor speakers do this with no ability to disable... seems like a trend in major electronics these days.

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