Wayland color management rant

Almost a year ago Wayland color management has finally been merged (12 years of discussion!). It’s a game-changer, allowing you to view non color-managed content in sRGB, clamped automatically by the compositor and at the same time enjoy wide-gamut in color managed apps.

However to this day almost nothing supports it. Chromium and derivatives have it and Krita will enable support in 6.0.0 whenever it comes out. No support in GIMP, Darktable, Rawtherapee or even Firefox. Even more so, because all of these apps are GTK 3, and GTK 4 is awful and nobody wants to switch to it we are stuck with toolkit that doesn’t support this protocol. And it never will because GNOME team wants everyone to switch to GTK 4.

So because of this we likely won’t be able to properly use a great color management system for even more years.

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Hi and welcome!

I find it a little sad that your first fortay into the community is “all of you aren’t volunteering your time good enough for me.”

Wayland took, as you said, 12 years, so it’s going to take a bit of time for the applications to catch up.

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I’m sorry if it came out that way. I’m mostly mad at GNOME developers, and one things they certainly don’t lack is volunteer developers.

Even the Krita patch is around 5500 lines of code, so I can’t even imagine what would it take to hack it on GTK 3.

I am just frustrated that no one is really talking about one of the best features of Wayland. And that it is very likely that it will take another however many years to implement it. Developers are doing a great work and I don’t want to diminish their work.

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I’m still using Xorg on my serious editing machine and will do so as long as it is the only thing that has the features I need. When wayland and applications are ready, I’ll make the switch. Until then, people just have to be plugging away at it.

You can say “gnome doesn’t lack devs” and while that might be true, the number of people who understand the domains of color management and display technology and are willing to write freely licensed code can probably be counted on your two hands.

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Have you tested wayland color management in a recent dev build of krita? I tested a few months ago and it didnt work.

Have you tested wayland color management in a recent dev build of krita?

Yeah, it’s working but you need to download a Qt6 build and pass an environment variable (explained here).

The thread on krita artists is about hdr. I am intersted in system wide color management and the correct display of colors outside of srgb. I dont have an hdr screen. Does that work?

Yes it does, I tested it on non-HDR screen. Wayland color management and HDR are two parts of the same protocol.

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hello @vamic

Even more so, because all of these apps are GTK 3, and GTK 4 is awful and nobody wants to switch to it we are stuck with toolkit that doesn’t support this protocol.

Just out of curiosity…

Have you tried the unstable version of Inkscape (the future 1.5 version)?
From what I have gathered it has already been ported to GTK4.
In addition, Martin Owens has been doing an incredible work on the colour management stuff.

BTW, as you mentioned, it will take quite a while before darktable - GIMP - RawTherapee-ART etc will be ported to GTK4.
As for darktable there is an initial effort to do so but the tasks for this transition are huge [1] and the manpower available is limited.

[1] Gtk4 Migration - Progress · Issue #15920 · darktable-org/darktable · GitHub

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I know there has been discussion of GTK4 for RT, but… Ugh, it’s a pretty nasty pile of work to migrate from what I saw.

I wonder if xwayland will be usable as an interim solution? Does that translate X color management to Wayland?

I don’t think so

I just tested but I still dont see the colors outside of srgb.

In the color management settings of krita I tried setting to 10bit but it doesnt seem to work. Under the drop down list I see 8bit, even though in the drop down list I chose 10 bit, no matter how often I restart.

But 10 bit shouldnt be obligatory for displaying colors outside of srgb.

Edit: apparently thats because I am using an nvidia graphics card. But that should not be a problem because it works with chrome/chromium.