I ran into a rare but not unheard of problem this morning while working on my desktop computer (running Linux Mint with the MATE desktop, and using a Dell monitor). Due to a somewhat funky arrangement of solar position, clouds, and possibly other celestial entities, the natural light behind my monitor caused a glare that made my eyes hurt a bit and caused me to have trouble seeing the screen. (Some what I guess you might call after-images were messing with my vision.) To reduce the glare, I wanted to dial down the monitor brightness ... but could not figure out how. The buttons on the Dell monitor are unlabeled, and I was not overly excited about a bunch of trial-and-error button pushing. So I naturally went to the system's display controls ... which did not have a brightness setting.
When I had some free time, I started searching the web for how to adjust display brightness in MATE, where to find GUI tools or applets for display brightness, and so on. I found lots of seeming helpful posts that either (a) referred to controls that do not exist in my operating system, despite allegedly being specific to MATE and possibly to MATE on Linux Mint or (b) pointed me to an applet that did not work (in some cases possibly because it only works on laptops for some reason?).
So, bottom line, I eventually wrote a bash script with a primitive GUI to let me futz with the display brightness. It uses the xrandr and zenity commands, either or both of which may need to be installed. (You can run "which xrandr" and "which zenity" in a terminal to see if you have them.) Once you have them, run "xrandr" in a terminal with no options to find out the name of your display (DP-2 in my case). Substitute that for DP-2 in the following script (and remember to make it executable with "chmod +x <your script>.sh", and you should be in business.
#!/bin/bash
# Adjust display brightness (1.0 being the default brightness).
# You can get the monitor name (DP-2 here) by running 'xrandr' in a terminal.
target=$(zenity --entry \
--title="Set Display Brightness" \
--text="Set a brightness level (base value = 1.0):" \
--entry-text="1.0")
xrandr --output DP-2 --brightness $target
zenity --info --text="Click OK to close the terminal."
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