Toggling Laptop Screen Auto Brightness in Pop!_OS
I recently got a new laptop from Framework. I'm running Pop!_OS, just like I was running on my HP Dev One I've blogged about previously. All of those little tricks and tweaks still apply.
One difference is that my Framework laptop has an ambient light sensor near the webcam, which is used to automatically adjust the brightness of the screen in response to changes in the ambient light level in the room. I usually turn this feature off on my laptops. It tends to be too sensitive for my preference.
On the last Dell XPS 13 I owned, I think there was an option to toggle this feature in the BIOS. The HP Dev One didn't have an ambient light sensor. On my Framework laptop, there is no option in the BIOS for this. Newer versions of GNOME's settings application have a GUI option to toggle this. But the latest version of Pop!_OS is still 22.04 LTS, nearly three years old now. I don't see that GUI option on my machine.
No matter, though. I was able to toggle this feature off using the gsettings command-line app. The setting I care about is ambient-enabled in org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.power.
To see the current value of this setting, run this command:
gsettings get org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.power ambient-enabled
This setting defaults to being turned on. To turn it off, run this command:
gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.power ambient-enabled false