Display brightness settings

[Chris Dekter <cdekter gmail com>]

Hi list,

I am trying to understand the logic behind the changes in power management settings from Gnome 2 -> 3. In particular, the removal of the separate display brightness settings for battery and AC mode. This seems to have been not merely a GUI simplification, as the settings don't exist in dconf either. My question is why this was done, since the display backlight is a major consumer of power on laptops. Every other OS/desktop environment allows this kind of dimming behaviour to be configured with varying levels of granularity. At first I thought the 'dim to save power' option might cause the display to be dimmed automatically when I unplug AC power, but that does not seem to be the case.

In my view at the absolute bare minimum users should be able to configure brightness settings for AC and battery modes, and possibly also also dimming levels for each of these. Dimming to 20% brightness might be fine on one machine, while on another it might make the display totally unreadable. 

If it is a matter of developer resources to get this functionality into Gnome, I would gladly offer up my time to get the task done.

Sincerely,
Chris Dekter