I just recently turned the keyboard backlight on, spent another 10’ or more watching a movie with zero interaction with it (or the touchpad), and noticed that the backlight stayed on the whole time.
I don’t think this is normal…
Is this how it’s supposed to work?
I’m running opensuse Tumbleweed with kernel 6.6.11 (although I suspect this is rather a BIOS/firmware feature).
There is no keyboard backlight timeout. They did mention that they would like to add one.
My thinkpad doesn’t have a backlight timeout either, on linux I use a script to create a timeout. Here is one for Framework on linux GitHub - jonas-schievink/keylightd: Keyboard backlight daemon for the Framework Laptop
Not sure if someone has made one for windows.
Correct, there is no time out setting. It’s pre-defined behavior.
This post is tagged for Framework 13. For anyone who’s curious about Framework 16, looks like it would be possible for that once since it supports QMK. Here is some Reddit stuff about how to add a firmware timeout in QMK. https://www.reddit.com/r/MechanicalKeyboards/comments/53nmvk/help_tmkqmk_led_timeout_after_n_minutes_of_idle/
That seems quite power consuming, tho
Any chance framework is reconsidering this decision?
At least it would be nice to have a toggle in the BIOS, no timeout vs timeout (e.g. 1 minute)
I don’t think it’s something Framework decided against.
It just hasn’t happened yet. It might not be high on the priority list. They are still a pretty small team.
The decision I was quoting is the one to ship without a timeout.
I’ve never said they’re against implementing, and if they’re in favor of doing so, even more the reason to ask if/when it will actually be done
It’s valid feedback. Nothing in the works for changing this behavior at this time that I am aware of, but I do appreciate the suggestion.
Does it really? I would imagine the LEDs draw only a very small amount of power… anyway as pointed out earlier in the thread, it is possible to manually emulate the timeout function in Linux (I’m not sure about Windows though, since I don’t think this would work by sending fn+space keys from software, I suspect the github link implements this through Linux sysfs).
Thanks Matt, I appreciate it 