ayaya

Oh hey, I love your work on Plasma’s HDR and color management. Glad to see you on Lemmy.

Phoronix is the ONLY website I disable uBlock Origin for.

I thought it was weird such an old piece of software had so much Rust in it. I noticed all the Rust-related things while Firefox Librewolf compiles but never looked into it further.

I have been playing through Elden Ring again with a friend using the seamless co-op mod and my friend on Windows gets (what we assume is) shader compilation stutter in every new area while my game has been smooth as butter.

There is a pretty big difference in terms of usability between Arch and everything else because of the rolling release model and the AUR. Lots of things you would have to manually install from a git repo or track down a PPA for can be installed like a normal package.

Plasma actually has a UI for smart TVs if you weren’t aware, although I have never used it myself so I’m not sure how good it is. https://plasma-bigscreen.org

That’s a really clever login system.

For me on Arch, Flatpaks are kinda useless. I can maybe see the appeal for other distros but Arch already has up-to-date versions of everything and anything that’s missing from the main repos is in the AUR.

I also don’t like how it’s a separate package manager, they take up more space, and to run things from the CLI it’s flatpak run com.website.Something instead of just something. It’s super cumbersome compared to using normal packages.

Oh if you have it set to sRGB mode then they should be accurate enough. That means it’s something else. My previous monitor also had a green tint in HDR and that was just because that monitor’s HDR was awful. If you want to check if it’s the monitor itself, you could try it with Windows or attach a Roku/Chromecast/Firestick type device that can output HDR. If it’s still green it’s the monitor’s fault and if it looks fine then it’s Plasma’s fault.

And yeah plenty of monitors have “some HDR support” it’s just not real HDR unless it gets bright enough (and dark enough). The whole point of having a High Dynamic Range is that the range is well… high. Black should be black and extremely bright things should be extremely bright. A lot of monitors advertise “HDR400” or “HDR600” but don’t have local dimming and only go to like 450 nits. At that level it’s barely going to look different from SDR which a lot of people run at 300-400 nits anyway. The overall range of brightness is around 0.2-450 when it should be 0-1000. That 0.2 doesn’t seem like a lot but if you’ve ever seen a completely black image in a dark room you know how not-black that is. Which is why OLED and local dimming are so important for HDR.

I also tried running a game in game scope with HDR enabled, experimenting with options and env cars I found online, but it just didn’t work.

To be fair I don’t play a lot of games so I have only used HDR in Baldur’s Gate 3 and Elden Ring but it worked perfectly in both so I am 2 for 2.

An extra annoyance is the fact that the LDR colors are quite off with HDR enabled on Plasma. I suspect this is the fault of the display or configuration, but it’s still something I’d have to spend time researching and fixing, only to barely get any use out of it.

Plasma is supposed to be able to display SDR content correctly while HDR is enabled (which Windows 10 can’t even do) but I can’t actually test that properly because my monitor doesn’t allow you to disable local dimming while in HDR mode so desktop stuff is completely unusable anyway. But if it doesn’t look right it is probably something you can fix in your monitor’s OSD.

I actually suspect the colors are correct and your normal colors are the incorrect ones. If your monitor has a wider gamut than sRGB you need to either A) set it to sRGB mode or B) use a calibrated ICC profile. If you aren’t doing one of those then all of your colors are oversaturated. When you switch into HDR they are correct but it looks dull in comparison because you’re used to them being wrong. It’s a pretty common thing people experience on Windows as well. Not a lot of people realize their colors are horribly inaccurate by default.

Also, most people only turn HDR on when it’s needed. You can add a keybind for it in Plasma’s shortcut settings. The commands are kscreen-doctor output.1.hdr.enable and kscreen-doctor output.1.hdr.disable. You may need to change the output number to the correct one.

I haven’t tried setting up steam itself in gamescope, but wouldn’t it be limited to one window then?

Yep. I don’t like it honestly. It’s just an option if you want to set it up once rather than on a per-game basis.

but I feel like there’s a lot of people who will just pay up for a good screen that includes HDR

That’s the thing, even if you pay up there aren’t actually any “good” HDR monitors. At least not in the same way as there are good HDR TVs. That’s why some people use 48 inch TVs as monitors instead of actual monitors. There’s a few monitors that are “good enough” but I wouldn’t call any of them “good” right now. I am one of those people who considers anything below HDR1000 to not be real HDR. If you look at the rtings.com monitor table, out of 317 monitors they’ve reviewed only TWO of them actually hit the 1000 nits of real scene brightness needed for HDR1000. And both are miniLED with local dimming which have haloing and blooming because there’s not enough dimming zones.

I have a feeling that by the time genuinely “good” HDR monitors exist (maybe 2-3 more years) that will be enough time for Linux programs to seamlessly support it instead of requiring launch arguments.

I don’t know when the last time you used Wayland was but in Plasma 6 I wouldn’t say it “breaks other things.” Before Plasma 6 I had plenty of problems and stuck on X11 but now it’s great. So give it another try if you haven’t recently. Every issue I used to have with it a year ago is gone.

As for the obscure parameters, as of Plasma 6.1 all you have to do for games is add gamescope --hdr-enabled to the launch options for the necessary games. I don’t think that’s particularly difficult or obscure. You can also set up Steam itself to run in gamescope with --hdr-enabled and then every game will have it.

For HDR movies/TV/YouTube you can copy/paste the necessary options into your mpv.conf and then forget about it. It’s a one-time thing and then it works forever.

The biggest place HDR is missing is in Firefox, but Firefox doesn’t have HDR on Windows either so that’s not a Linux thing that’s a Firefox thing.

In my opinion, HDR on the desktop isn’t really there yet in general. Not just on Linux but on computers as a whole. HDR right now is really only for enthusiasts. The only monitors that properly support HDR1000 are $500+ for the entry level ones and $800+ for the decent ones. And you have to choose between miniLED with local dimming that don’t have enough zones yet or OLEDs that get burn-in after a year.

And HDR has been working for me for over 6 months with Plasma 6. I wish people wouldn’t upvote this stuff that gives the wrong idea.

I did not realize that. That explains why it’s not on F-Droid. Really unfortunate but at least it can still be publicly audited.

The version on the Play Store requires a “premium” subscription for some features but the Github release gets those for free.

Try Keyguard, it is open source and much nicer than the regular Bitwarden app. Do not use the version from the Play Store though, get it directly from Github.

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Just buy them on eBay. Why does it matter where they come from? Again, four of them have to die before it’s no longer worth it. It’s extremely unlikely you’d be that unlucky.

Personally I have 15 drives in my NAS, all of them were bought used and they’ve been running 24/7 for 4+ years without issue. Originally I expected to lose at least one per year but they just keep chugging along. All of them have at least 40k power on hours, with the oldest 3TB ones having over 80k (9+ years)

I use unRAID so if/when one does die it’s as simple as pulling out the dead one, popping in a new one, and letting it rebuild itself.

Especially for hard drives. 8TB SAS drives are down to about $45 a piece.

Brand new enterprise-grade 8TB drives are more around $180 new. Meaning as long as you have redundancy (which you should anyway) then you can lose four used drives before it stops being worth it. Not to mention drives get cheaper so if your $45 drive dies 2 years from now you could probably replace it for $35 etc.

I don’t understand. What is the problem with what I said? I am genuinely confused by your response.

How is it off-putting that you can install a package with the exact version you want instead of doing it yourself. What you said puts more people off of Arch, not me. What you said makes Arch sound more complicated than it is.

In Arch there are AUR packages for specific versions so you don’t have to do it yourself. Arch is about picking and choosing your packages, but not really about actually building/patching things on your own like LFS or Gentoo.

Although picking a rolling-release distro and then using an outdated kernel does seem counter-intuitive.