No brightness control. Debian with KDE on iMac 2013

I installed Debian 12 with KDE on a 2013 iMac. I just love the new system, except I can’t adjust screen brightness. So far I have spent several hours trying.

  • There are no brightness controls in the KDE settings.
  • xbacklight reports: “No outputs have backlight property”.
  • ddcutil reports: “invalid display”, “DDC communication failed”.
  • xgamma is unable to make any changes.
  • sys/class/backlight is empty.

System specs:

  • KDE Plasma 5.27.5
  • KDE Frameworks 5.103.0
  • Qt 5.15.8
  • Linux Kernel 6.1.0-34-amd64 (64-bit)
  • Graphics Platform: Wayland
  • Graphics Processor: NVE7
  • Graphics controller: NVIDIA Corporation GK107M [GeForce GT 750M Mac Edition] (rev a1)
  • Computer: iMac 14,3 (late 2013)

Display details:

  • description: VGA compatible controller
  • product: GK107M [GeForce GT 750M Mac Edition]
  • vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
  • physical id: 0
  • bus info: pci@0000:01:00.0
  • logical name: /dev/fb0
  • version: a1
  • width: 64 bits
  • clock: 33MHz
  • capabilities: pm msi pciexpress vga_controller bus_master cap_list rom fb
  • configuration: depth=32 driver=nouveau latency=0 resolution=1920,1080
    – resources: irq:56 memory:b0000000-b0ffffff memory:90000000-9fffffff memory:a0000000-a1ffffff ioport:2000(size=128) memory:b1000000-b107ffff