I just ordered a new computer and display (Lenovo ThinkVision P32pz-30 31.5" 4K UHD mini LED) for myself, but I forgot to check beforehand if Linux supports VESA-certified HDR1000 displays correctly. After some wandering on the web, I found that there seems to be some support in Wayland and Plasma 6. After all my reading, I’m still quite confused about which distro I should use to see HDR content correctly.
Does anyone have any suggestions about what to try first? I’m most familiar with Debian and its derivatives, but I’m ready to switch to another distribution if HDR displays are better supported elsewhere. Is KDE and Plasma the best option for this, or is there something else I should consider?
I’m also interested to know if it is not possible to get that display to work correctly, so I can change it to a much cheaper alternative.
Any distro with up to date KDE or Gnome will most likely work properly. HDR landed in Gnome 48, so it will be a valid choice for you as well. Nvidia HDR support has been having its up and downs, but should be getting better soon, whilst AMD seems to work pretty well out of the box in KDE.
This development has been mostly done in regards to media consumption, so video, games, etc. Dunno how darktable will handle it, but you can always disable HDR whilst working with photos anyway. If I was you, I would keep the monitor
Thanks, I missed that Gnome 48 has now HDR support. I will go for Debian and Gnome first as I’m most familiar with them.
My plan was to make HDR versions of my photos. I found already at least one tutorial how to create those in darktable so it should be possible. Maybe I will play some slow paced games also.
While you can certainly create (i.e. export) those, I still think they won’t correspond to what you see in the dt darkroom, I don’t think that viewport is HDR aware in any way? So I guess it’ll take some experimentation to get the workflow right, but please do share your experience by any means.
Yes, I’m not expecting wysiwyg for editing images. Maybe it will come in the future, but for now it is enough if I can see them in HDR. I was just too interested to see what future will be for editing (as a learning experience) and then viewing those images on HDR screen.
Debian Unstable it is then I need also kernel 6.13 because it will have better support for AMD processors with v-cache.
I was planning also to run windows only in virtualised this time (I have some stuff I still need it). Currently windows is installed on second disk, but friend told me that he got it running very well with KVM. He just pinned performance cores to windows VM and left efficiency cores for host linux. Even graphic card worked (with passthrough) so well that he did not notice any meaningful performance drops in games. I hope I can get this working also with this new AMD processor.
I should probably start to read lwn.net again. I have missed so many things in Linux world lately. Like this latest Debian freeze and HDR in Gnome 48.
It has been more than 15 years when I last time used openSUSE. I might need to try that first. I have heard many good things about it from some people I know. And if I can’t understand it I can always go back to Debian.
Before you get too deep into trying to chase HDR through all the linux repositories, do some general calibration of the monitor using SDR, and edit an image to your liking, and send it to your phone, a laptop, whatever you have that isn’t HDR. As many (i’d still say the vast majority) of screens digital images will be viewed on, won’t have real HDR. The biggest problem with HDR is it will look NOTICEABLY different when viewed on SDR, while SDR images are more capably supported by screens with HDR. An HDR edited image will look washed out and lacking in constrast/darker colors on SDR.
