I3wm macbook pro - need help / guidance

Desktop Environments All WMs
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Hi there,

New to the forum and to the linux world in general.

I have installed EOS (i3-wm) on my macbook pro 8,1 early 2011 and been playing around with it for some weeks, I am really enjoying the whole window manager aspect of it.

So far I am able to setup most of the things I want except for the keyboard and display backlight, I am aware that I can adjust these things in the files located in /sys/class/leds/smc::kbd_backlight. It is not really an ideal way and would like a more elegant solution.

I did notice that during in the live environment, the XFCE-4 version I was able to control both the keyboard and display backlight brightness using the default keyboard shortcuts on the macbook keyboard (f2, f3, f6, f7) and I even got a visual indicator on screen that updated as I changed the brightness levels.

Now my question, is there a way to get that functionality in the i3wm EOS version, by maybe installing the required packages and just grabbing the configs from the XFCE-4 EOS github page? Is this even possible since I am running i3 and XFCE-4 are 2 different DEs?

Being new to linux, I am able to grasp alot of concepts, however some still feel foreign to me. I do like to experiment and mess around so I am not afraid of getting my hands dirty and messing around with config files to get something done.

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Welcome to the forum!

You could try this in your i3 config file? Works for me on lenovo laptops.

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Ok so I got it to work by downloading the XFCE-4 power manager package in combination with the keybinds you mentioned.

Thanks!

I have another issue tho, transparency is not working for me. I un-commented the below line in the i3 config:

exec --no-startup-id picom -CGb

but now when i reboot the machine, I end up in an loop with putting in my password at the login screen. It just takes me back to the login screen.

When I alt+ctrl+f2 to bring i up the terminal and comment out the same line, it goes back to normal.

Not sure whats going on here…but i guess Picom is not playing nicely with my macbook? Can anyone shed some light here?

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Issue resolved, for anyone facing the same the fix was generate the config file for picom:

picom --config path/to/picom.conf

source: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Picom#Installation