It's Looking Like 2024 Could Be The Year Of HDR On The Linux Desktop
While Valve has HDR working nicely on the Steam Deck OLED with their Gamescope compositor, when it comes to conventional Linux desktops with HDR there is a lot of activity happening but much of it is still pending. Though with how things are pacing with experimental AMD color management in Linux 6.8 and various desktop pieces slowly but surely coming together, it's looking like 2024 could finally be the year that HDR on the Linux desktop will work nicely.
Xaver Hugl shared an end of year update around the state of High Dynamic Range support for the KDE desktop. Some of the main takeaways from that update include:
- KWin now supports ICC profiles though at the moment apps are still limited to sRGB use.
- System76 has implemented a Vulkan layer that allows applications to use the VK_EXT_swapchain_colorspace and VK_EXT_hdr_metadata protocols.
- Plasma 6.0 will enable HDR in the display settings. In turn when Plasma 6 has HDR enabled there is then SDR Brightness and SDR Color Intensity settings.
- KWin has implemented a small Wayland protocol similar to how the Steam Deck OLED with Gamescope is handling HDR. This is being done until the proper Wayland HDR protocol is complete upstream.
- Plasma 6 + Gamescope is yielding working HDR for games like God of War, Cyberpunk 2077, Quake II RTX, and others.
Xaver ended his latest update with:
"Obviously there is still a lot to do. Color management is limited to either sRGB or full-blown rec.2020, you shouldn’t have to install stuff from Github yourself, and certainly shouldn’t have to mess around with the command line4 to play games and watch videos in HDR, HDR screenshots and HDR screen recording aren’t a thing yet, and many other small and big things need implementing or fixing. There’s a lot of work needed to make these things just work™ as they should outside of special cases like the gamescope embedded session.
Things are moving fast though, and I’m pretty happy with the progress we made so far."
See Xaver's blog for all the EOY2023 updates on KDE Plasma HDR support.
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