I have my desktop hooked up to a large TV / monitor and in the day time all is good.

At night though it's so blindingly bright, that I frequently wish I could turn the brightness down, however this isn't like a laptop screen. There is no hardware way of turning the screen brightness down through powerdevil. That's why I'm wondering if there is any way in Kwin to just make what goes onto the screen darker (like compositing black over the top transparently, or something).

I've tried using darker colour schemes, but there are always things that are white on screen regardless. I just want to make the *whole screen* darker.

http://kde-apps.org/content/show.php?content=123805

Nightmode is a kwin plugin that makes the entire screen darker. The reason behind this for when you are using the laptop at night, either outside or in bed - and find that even on the darkest screen backlight level the screen is way too bright.

The plugin can be turned on or off by a simple key combination, and the amount of dimming can be configured.

note: never tried it but sounds what you're looking for

Cool! Thanks google01103! That sounds like *exactly* what I was after! I never thought to look at freedesktop.org for Kwin effects... Now I'm wondering what else I can find in there...

Damn. I just can't understand why this isn't available as one of the default available effects, but the option to make windows explode with a cheesy effect, is. Off to compile for the N'th time, I go.