Wayland color management

No. Just browse the dev mailing list of Wayland.

Wayland has been started to fix the security issues of Xorg, mostly harming people connecting to a graphic session remotely through a network. It has been designed to be a hardened graphic server for geeks.

The last time I had to connect remotely to a graphic server was in engineering school for an assignment. The last time I had to calibrate my screen and install a new color profile was last week. Says the guy pissing C code for a living.

For years, they have repeated they don’t care about color management, that color management is a threat to their perfect little world of hardcore security, and refused input and requests from the senior color management devs in the opensource world. Well, nothing is more secure than a product that doesn’t work, is it ?

You don’t try to reason with people who fail to see that any graphic server will ultimately display colors, and that color management is… well not an option but a core feature. You call them stupid again and again until they break. Because stupid is what it is, and when devs are not paid, there is no way to fire them, so harassment it is. The matter is pressing enough as Wayland is now the default graphic server for most Linux distros, and has put the whole graphic community in deep shit, even more now than Xorg is tagged abandonware.

Xorg will remain the only sane option for a long time, for everyone using a display to display colors. But I fear it will soon be deprecated in many distros. And that is unacceptable.

Graphic artists rely on color management to do their job. Users rely on color management to see what the graphic artists intended for them to see. The sRGB standard comes from 1999. Everybody knows that since at least 1999, there are no excuses. Wayland has been actively ignoring that.

I don’t care if it’s a hobby project from unpaid devs: you do something, you do it right or you do nothing and let someone competent do it. Because, again, that hobby project is now the default server in many distros.

So, kudos to Pekka for bringing some sense back in that project, but color management being an after-thought in a design that is already a decade old, there are good chances that’s it’s already too late.

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