KDE Plasma 6.3 To Offer Better Night Light Mode On HDR Displays

[sophisticles]

Just a clarification: are you talking about the Redmond based operating system?

I know it's difficult for the Linux faithful to admit, but the two major commercial OSes, Windows and Mac OS, have has billions spent on them over decades to ensure that they work correctly without having to screw around for hours trying to configure them.

[sophisticles]

Can someone explain to me the purpose of night light mode?

Are KDE users really using their computer monitors as a night light?

More fundamentally, KDE users are so immature that they need to use a night light of any type?

[bug77]

There is one known shortcoming though if the display is using a native white point of 6504K, which will be better handled in future versions of Plasma

This is actually wrong, the issue is users that do not have their monitors set at 6500K. Most users that care about color accuracy, do, however.

[bug77]

Can someone explain to me the purpose of night light mode?

Are KDE users really using their computer monitors as a night light?

More fundamentally, KDE users are so immature that they need to use a night light of any type?

Google could explain that to you (your phone has the same feature, the fact that you didn't bother to check it speaks volumes). It's supposed to reduce the amount of emitted blue light that can interfere with your sleep cycle (i.e. as long as your brain still processes a certain amount of blue light, it will think it's not the time to go to sleep yet).

[Hibbelharry]

I know it's difficult for the Linux faithful to admit, but the two major commercial OSes, Windows and Mac OS, have has billions spent on them over decades to ensure that they work correctly without having to screw around for hours trying to configure them.

Owning a HDR capable display and using a dual boot machine myself I can assure Windows support for HDR is also crappy. It took me a lot of fiddling to get my display colors decently right when HDR is enabled. Windows itself does not render in HDR and needs to do color translation, too and there are many things visibly going nuts on that step. Right now there are also issues with Windows 11 24H2 crashing games when AutoHDR is active...

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/microsoft-says-auto-hdr-causes-game-freezes-on-windows-11-24h2/

[Danny3]

What has one to do with the other? Until not so long ago everyone recommended Ubuntu and that was pretty much the best option for newbies. Than they started using snap and now we need to find another best new recommendation. I recommend Mint with XFCE but it has certainly not the dominance that Ubuntu had.

There's a video of someone trying Ubuntu, it is sadly realistic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3d7SzX0SK24

I stopped recommending Ubuntu a long time ago, way before they started to force push Snaps on people!
And I recommended Linux Mint!
Until they decided to drop the KDE edition, despite all our complaints and being the best DE even then, in 2017.
Very strange and stupid that they keep ignoring it after 8 years in which KDE received a tremendous amount of bug fixes and improvements...

I highly doubt that, we would need more devs not donations or newbies using the systems.

Of course we need more devs, but those tend to come and do better work where's there's money too.
Either with some freed food, coffees or hiring them full-time, part-time or from time to time and to buy all the expensive stuff for them like:
1. Displays (TVs or monitors) with advanced features such as high resolution, high dpi, high refresh rate, adaptive refresh rate (Freesync, VRR), HDR, OLED, DDC support.
2. color meters to calibrate, measure test their displays and code.
3. power meters to test and improve the power efficiency of the code.
Developer time costs money, high quality displays with lots of features cost money, color meters and power meters cost money.
All 3 things can be helped with donations.
Since donators and money are limited, spreading them to too many DEs and especially with DEs like Cinnamon, MATE, XFCE, which only recently started investing in Wayland support, after ignoring it for such a long time, and don't have any kind of HDR or even color management, they money are wasted when they could've been put to use better.

I wouldn't say HDR works well in Windows but yes it's better than in Linux. Just don't recommend Linux if someone needs HDR. Simple.
BTW for night vision there's redshift that I use since ages and it always works, not sure why we need something new?

Just not recommending Linux if someone needs HDR is not feasible and out of the question since we now have so much media with HDR metadata like personal videos and photos, videos on Youtube, movies and games.
Besides, so many graphics, game and content creators need higher color and light accuracy and HDR helps with that.

I thought they only have unpaid devs?

As long as they have lots of donations each month, which they did last time I checked, I can't say they are completely unpaid.
What have they done with the money from donations I don't know as I have never seen them materialize in some upstream contributions, like to the Linux, Mesa, KDE Plasma, Gnome and of course wayland projects.
They take money, but never countribute to something that is not invented by them!
Maybe they suffer from the NIH syndrome.

At least Mint works well if you know to avoid snaps and it's more beginner friendly than Ubuntu ever was with all the online resources and 3th party stuff from Ubuntu working in Mint too. I don't know any other distro that fulfills this criteria.

Debian, OpenSUSE, Fedora, KDE Neon and so many other distros work well too, but they also don't stupidly go to great lengths to avoid the first two most popular and advnced DEs!

So many Linux distros just work well so I don't think it's such a good excuse for Linux Mint developers to use to hide their vendetta against these two most popular DEs.

[Danny3]

Just a clarification: are you talking about the Redmond based operating system?

Yes, but I haven't used it anymore since I moved from Windows 7 to Linux about 7 years ago.
I don't know how the situation is now, I just assumed that it's good since HDR is not built-in and on Windows 7 is was not.
Even though I watched a lot of HDR movies on Windows 7 both on non-HDR monitor with tonemapping and on a HDR TV with passthrough over the HDMI cable.
The developers of MPC-HC and MadVr did wonders to allow both scenarios to work and work well, considering Windows 7 never had any kind of HDR support.
I'm very glad that Linux with the help of KDE Plasma is finally being able to catch that.
Too bad VLC is light years behind MPC-HC + MadVr when it comes to HDR support.
Haruna seems to be better with that, but it has a pretty crappy interface compared to both MPC-HC and VLC.

[MorrisS.]

how diethering is integrated in the system?

[equeim]

I'm still waiting on Plasma to render itself in HDR. It's annoying having to tweak my SDR settings just to get native windows to look half decent. It's bad enough that Chrome and Firefox don't render properly in HDR (Firefox can't even render HDR videos) despite Windows supporting HDR for like 10 years at this point.

HDR has to implemented in all layers of graphics stack. For Plasma to make use of HDR it has first to be implemented in Qt. And Qt (as well as Firefox and Chrome) requires a stable HDR API for applications (Wayland protocol). Which still does not exist except in experimental form, which is obviously not suitable for developers of these projects.

[Firnefex]

If the picture of 6.3 is correct, then 6.2 seems to have way better color accuracy (e.g. Spotify green), also where do these stripes in the clouds come from?