Sometime last year, I got a new headless workstation for building software and installed Debian 10 on it. Almost everything went well, except that there was an extremely annoying issue that would cause the machine to auto-suspend every 20 or so minutes (which is pretty bad for a headless build machine!).
My main work laptop is a Thinkpad X1 Carbon running Debian 9, which usually works pretty well but I've also been procrastinating on getting it to run perfectly.
One thing I had forgotten to configure was the screen brightness keys with my
window manager i3. I had forgotten that I tried to configure it before, but got
stuck on some extremely unhelpful error messages from xbacklight. Anyhow,
this short blog post documents a workaround for the issue in case anyone else
has a similar setup.