Display brightness level numerically - laptop built-in display

General Help
1

Does anybody know - is it possible to display (ideally, set) the laptop display brightness to an exact level?

Usually I have my external monitor, however for photo editing when just on laptop I would really like to see what level the brightness is at, rather than just the slider position, so as to maintain consistency.

I'd also looked at a few utils for setting display brightness exactly, but wasn't sure if any worked with laptop built-in display,

I am on Zorin 17.3 with Wayland (I've stayed on it as the default. In fact I experienced display issues when I did try x11 a few times).

Thank you!

2

You can try it with brightnessctl

sudo apt install brightnessctl

Then run

brightnessctl info

and it shows the current brightness as number.

To set a specific brightness number, e.g. 5000:

sudo brightnessctl set 5000

Replace the number with a value you like. The brightnessctl info shows you what the highest value is that you can set.

I tested it in Zorin 18 on my laptop. It worked in Xorg and Wayland.

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3

Maybe this Gnome Extensions suit You:

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4

If you want to manage the brightness on laptop and external monitor this gnome extension can help. You can enable to show a value label in the extension.

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5

Thank you, all great solutions.
I'd like to set both Forpli and Ponce-de-Leon as solutions if I could.

brighntessctrl allows for finer granularity, but the extension is quicker and probably close enough.

Side note: I had searched in extension-manager for display, brightness and a few other terms. Nothing useful showed up, or all that did were deprecated. I even searched in there just now for 'discrete brightness' and - no search result.

Brilliant. Easily solved, and thank you.

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