On the other hand it's not as easy to adjust brightness on desktop monitors so I appreciate having the option either way.
Software brightness control on desktop monitors is something I've wanted for a while. Closest thing I've seen is a monitor with a built in light sensor that has the option of auto adjusting independent of the computer.
It has long been possible to adjust the brightness of monitors through software. The trouble is that laptop displays and external displays do it in two different ways, and the external monitor one is pretty much unknown and unused by normal software.
Taking my laptop as an example: Windows has two APIs for adjusting screen brightness, one of which only works for the internal display and one of which only works for external displays; and sadly the brightness keys on the laptop are uninterceptable and I have not come up with any way of linking the brightnesses either. I went hunting and settled on some old freeware called ScreenBright which I can invoke from the command line, so that now I just run `b 0` for night time and `b 40` for most of the day (and up to 70% in certain seasons—but 100% is pretty much always too bright where I use my external displays). Since I arranged that workflow, I have also written a tiny Rust program that interacts with the APIs directly which could replace it.
>and sadly the brightness keys on the laptop are uninterceptable
This doesn't seem to be true for most laptops. The ones I have used show a OS graphic when you turn the brightness down similar to the volume. Have tested this using linux on a dell xps and a macbook.
Unfortunately both still do not adjust the brightness of external monitors.
On my previous laptop I ran Arch Linux with i3, and handled the XF86Brightness keys myself. But at present I’m using Windows, and I haven’t found any means of intercepting the keys: Windows handles them in some way that prevents me from handling them myself.
Is this still not common? I have an Apple Cinema Display from 15 years ago and it has both hardware brightness controls (on the right edge), and software brightness control (keyboard f-keys, labeled as such on Apple keyboards).
It's been a very long time since I used a monitor with any sort of rotating dial.
The trend for decades now has been to have buttons only, and often there's a menu you have to navigate through in order to actually get to the brightness settings. It's a real hassle on many monitors.
Software brightness control on desktop monitors is something I've wanted for a while. Closest thing I've seen is a monitor with a built in light sensor that has the option of auto adjusting independent of the computer.