I love it when I update Plasma and discover feature I had no idea my laptop even had (Ambient Light Sensor, or ALS). This is insanely nice on a laptop that has an AMOLED screen

@elly which distro do you daily drive?

@stilic depends which system, on this one I use Chimera. It's nice, but had some issues with auto-rotation (despite iio-sensor-proxy being installed and stuff) and a lot of packages are missing so I'm considering switching it to Gentoo (which would be the same as my desktop at home)

@elly If you want something close to Chimera but with more packages, maybe Alpine could be a good choice
You can always use something like Nix or Distrobox or containers if you need software not available in the repos

@elly But yeah, personally I ended up using Gentoo as well (actually I'm building it as an immutable image through Gardenhouse, and I heard Xenia Linux is doing something similar but for all distros)

@stilic I use pmOS/Alpine on some devices, sure. I refuse to use Nix or Distrobox though, bubblewrap or docker are perfectly fine solutions to that problem.

If you're insane enough (like me), binary-patching closed-source software (i.e: Steam), giving it missing shared libraries and running it natively on musl system is also an option

@elly this is undoubtedly the main (only?) downside of WMs imo
No gui settings means no accidental feature discovery like this. Didn't know your laptop could do it? Never will
Alternatively, even if you do know your laptop can do it, there may not be a way to take advantage of it
Scary thoughts, scary scary thoughts

@mirq best part is that I haven't seen that sensor ANYWHERE in the firmware, and I was the one who upstreamed audio support for this laptop, fixed sleep issues and pen/rotation. When I got this laptop for my birthday in December 2022 it basically didn't work in Linux whatsoever.

@elly that's so fuckin cool!

@mirq @elly
Heaven is a textmode port of KDE System Settings.

@elly ambient light sensor-equiped laptops existed even back in 2011 (my laptop has it)

@fun @elly yep, my old Dell E6400 had an ALS too

@elly Reminds me it took me six months to discover my new laptop (the HP Omen 16, with a Ryzen 7 7840HS) has keyboard backlight with configurable colours. I mean, colours are not per-key configurable but at least I can make it glow in the dark!

@th3fanbus backlight keyboard is a must these days tbh, can't use a laptop without one