last week it took me almost an hour to figure out why my icc profile wasn’t applying on my desktop, and this was the culprit!
The problem with this approach is that, from my testing, KDE seems to split the profile into two parts. it provides simplified information about the color space to the application, and still applies some brightness or gamma adjustments on the whole desktop… one would have to strip out that adjustment from the monitor profile for it to be correct when using it in an application and trying to “bypass” KDEs color profile
I’ve made a small tool, cm-shim, that lets one provide colorspace information to wayland for any application.
Its is vibecoded, but its only ~ 900 LoC… On my system it seems very stable, and my testing has yielded promising results… dE average of 0.25 between kdes pipeline with cm-shim, and Wayland color management turned off and display .icc applied in application.
If anyone is interested in testing it, I’m very interested to hear if it works as expected for other people, and if it works with your application of choice!
also, in hyprland discussions theres a really good suggestion to add a color management passthrough window rule. It needs upvotes so the devs can know that people yearn for better color management options in wayland!