Can't control the display brightness on Lenovo X1 yoga OLED

I'm with 16.10 and Yoga X1 OLED beast of a laptop but unfortunately can't control the display brightness. It's at the maximum. Both the keyboard and settings control move the slide bar but it does nothing to the actual brightness and it stays at maximum.

Solution 1:

I just stumbled on this question, looking for an answer I gave a while ago regarding OLED screens in X11. See here. I normally bind some variations of the command to some keys, so I can switch fast:

xrandr --output eDP1 --brightness 1   # no dimming
xrandr --output eDP1 --brightness .5  # dim to half 

Entering xrandr by itself shows the device-name to be used (eDP1 or eDP-1 or the like). The number can be anything between 0 and 1.

Floating point numbers can be used. If the value is greater than 1 screen goes above normal brightness but colors become saturated.

Solution 2:

Two options to manually change the display brightness:

xrandr --output eDP1 --brightness $brightness

redshift -P -O $temperature -b $brightness

$brightness is a value between 0 and 1 for xrandr and between 0.1 and 1 for redshift. It's the same value, but redshift prevents you from using values lower than 0.1 (which can lead to totally dark screen)

$temperature is the night light temperature. Use 6500 for daylight (no night light), 3500 is a common night filter value.

I've heard that the redshift method also works on Wayland.

You might be interested in this project, which takes full advantage of these commands to bring back full-featured brightness control to your OLED display (sounds weird to say "full featured something that should work out of the box", but such is life. Check it out, most likely you'll love it)