You know what I truly don’t understand and it really boggles my mind?
Where are the people from all the huge companies releasing graphics software for Linux? Why aren’t they engaging in the discussion? They are, after all, making huge amounts of money from it and they would make even more. I think it’s probably worth mentioning them here and maybe us “banding together” might be worth to bring this issue to the attention of the big software companies that actually stand to directly profit from that work.
Just some of the huge “industry” software that works on Linux and required proper color management:
BlackMagic DaVinci Resolve also Fusion
Adobe Substance 3D
Autodesk Maya
Maxon (various software like Cinema 4D etc.)
SideFX Houdini
Foundry (various software like Nuke)
Otoy Render Engine (“The world’s first spectrally correct, unbiased render engine”…)
RodeoFX OpenWalter
ftrack
BorisFX
Weta Digital
And about Weta Digital, here is a quote from Dustin Kirkland:
Next I attended Paul Gunn’s talk in the SysAdmin Track on Weta Digital’s effects rendering data center, here in Wellington. Very early in the talk, he noted that 90% of their artists run the Ubuntu Desktop, with the remaining 10% using Windows. Adobe Photoshop is one of the few remaining apps that still need Windows for. He went on to talk more about their server render farm, noting that all of their 35,000 cores are also running Ubuntu. In the talk, he called these “Ubuntu Servers”, which to me meant that they were installed from the Ubuntu Server seed.
Also, I remember one guy telling me how they only use Linux to produce Dr. Who, after a bit of digging, I’ve found out that Linux has been used at BBC by content producers since 1999!!
There are also “Linux” foundations that are apparently involved with VFX industry etc. How come none of their people are involved in the discussion?
https://vfxplatform.com/linux/
https://www.aswf.io/
What I’m wondering is when will everyone stop pretending like Linux is not used in the graphics industries? It’s literally everywhere, the only proprietary software that comes to Linux is precisely that kind and yet the OS itself gets the least love in that area.
Wayland has an opportunity to make something right here. Atm the best color management is on MacOS so it would need to be at least on par with that.
Maybe we need to do some outreach to those proprietary software vendors for something to actually be done? This is a bipartisan issue, both foss and closed after all xD
You also said you wanted a concrete things you could share with devs. I just want to reintroduce this into the thread in case some ppl have missed it and since the link to the original seems to be broken:
https://web.archive.org/web/20211028152104/https://www.argyllcms.com/CM_requirements.txt