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After having installed the proprietary Nvidia driver on Debian Jessie in order to play Steam games (which I now can), I can't change the brightness at all, it is stuck at the maximum and is irritating my eyes at night. I have already tried all of the solutions in the Debian wiki

such as adding the line: Option "RegistryDwords" "EnableBrightnessControl=1;" to /etc/X11/xorg.conf and /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-nvidia.conf

but that has not worked, even though in the Debian forums it seems to work (marked solved):

xbacklight does not work at all, and I don't know what to do anymore. I will post any outputs for whatever terminal commands, please help.

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    How about xrandr --output LVDS1 --brightness 0.4 (put your display instead of lvds1 if needed)? – jimmij Jan 11 '16 at 0:33
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    xrandr --output LVDS-0 --brightness 0.2 works! It doesn't seem to change the brightness at the hardware level, but it will save my eyes! Thanks to user jimmij! – anon76 Jan 11 '16 at 0:44
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    Yes, this is software change, and echo 2 > /sys/class/backlight/acpi_video0/brightness doesn't work? (again change acpi_video0 to your device like intel_backlight etc.). – jimmij Jan 11 '16 at 0:54
  • When I do sudo echo 2 > /sys/class/backlight/asus-nb-wmi/brightness I get: bash: /sys/class/backlight/asus-nb-wmi/brightness: Permission denied – anon76 Jan 11 '16 at 1:25
  • Try running sudo -s then the eco. Sudo doesn't work over piped echos in the way described. You need to do echo "moo" | sudo tee /patch/to/file.txt – Torxed Jan 11 '16 at 8:44
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After adding the following line in your X device configuration

Option  "RegistryDwords"  "EnableBrightnessControl=1"

You can use the software xbacklight to adjust the brightness:

xbacklight -set 60
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  • Added that option to my /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-nvidia.conf in Debian 8 and now everything works normally in KDE – LatinSuD Jul 25 '17 at 20:17
  • Seems KDE is more forgiving than gnome, FWIW askubuntu.com/a/1152763/20972 – rogerdpack Jun 21 '19 at 4:35
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Complementing @semente answer:

xbacklight +10
xbacklight -10

increase and decrease the backlight in steps of 10%. They can be associated to keys with xbindkeys by following the instructions here. Below is sample of the .xbindkeysrc with this commands associated to the Windows + F5 and Windows + F6 keys: 

"xbacklight +10"
 Mod4 + F6

"xbacklight -10"
 Mod4 + F5
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1

I followed this tutorial to install NVidia driver for linux from NVidia:

http://allaboutlinux.eu/remove-nouveau-and-install-nvidia-driver-in-debian-8/2/

and now I have NVIDIA X Server Settings GUI which can be launched from applications drawer, then I go to GPU 0 --> CRT-0 --> Color Correction and I'm able to set brightness to negative value.

enter image description here

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  • 3
    This doesn't change the backlight brightness. – Tim Richardson Feb 15 '17 at 3:04
  • thanks for this color correction settings, i didn't know that @TimRichardson, you could use xrandr --output HDMI-0 --brightness 0.7 change the HDMI-0 with your monitor – haidarvm Dec 17 '20 at 3:21

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