Hey, my previous laptop is a ThinkPad Yoga 370!
The ambient light sensor in that thinkpad and also the framework does work out of the box indeed on Gnome at least. Even back in 2017. I disabled it as quickly as I could because it’s annoying. Shadow of your head moves across the sensor? Brightness does down and up again. And not as smoothly as you might like.
peter@raamwerk ~> monitor-sensor
Waiting for iio-sensor-proxy to appear
+++ iio-sensor-proxy appeared
=== No accelerometer
=== Has ambient light sensor (value: 80,069000, unit: lux)
=== No proximity sensor
Light changed: 80,016000 (lux)
Light changed: 76,273000 (lux)
Light changed: 80,123000 (lux)
Light changed: 80,069000 (lux)
Light changed: 79,807000 (lux)
Light changed: 77,801000 (lux)
Light changed: 80,278000 (lux)
Light changed: 79,910000 (lux)
I assume monitor-sensor is a part of iio-sensor-proxy (which is not a gnome package and doesn’t have any gnome dependencies).
The wiki does say:
To make this devices work with GNOME you need to install iio-sensor-proxy package.
Which implies Gnome might be the only DE that supports ambient light sensors trough iio maybe? That line of text might also be outdated. If other desktops support it, then I expect that to just work if iio-sensor-proxy is installed. And even if your desktop doesn’t support it you could install it anyway so you can at least verify the sensor works with monitor-sensor.