ayaya

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 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.

Wow, that is incredibly unfortunate timing.

As long as you still have access to the cli it should be fixable. If you want to still try to get to plasma 6 make sure you also enabled the core-testing and extra-testing repos in addition to kde-unstable as per the wiki

If you enable any other testing repository listed in the following subsections, you must also enable both core-testing and extra-testing

I missed that little snippet when I first swapped over.

If you do yay kf6 you can install all of the framework-related packages which might also help fill out some missing dependencies. For me it’s 1-71. You can do the same with yay plasma and then choose the ones from kde-unstable (122-194 for me) but you will have to manually avoid the ones with conflicts like plasma-framework.

But if you want to try and revert theoretically simply removing the testing and unstable repos and doing another sudo pacman -Syu should get you back onto the older versions.

You can do sudo pacman -Syudd where the dd is for ignoring dependencies to force it through. But be aware this is basically asking for things to break. Some packages haven’t been updated to the latest versions yet. For example dolphin wouldn’t launch so I had to switch to dolphin-git from the AUR.

Same here. Been going on 8 years with the same install and it has never let me down. The only time something “breaks” is when I’m the one who caused it, and it’s always been easily fixable with arch-chroot from the iso. Although I haven’t even had to resort to that in 3 or 4 years now.

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There are at least 20 different options to choose from, surely one of them has what you want. And that number is only going to rise. Saying it never will is extremely short-sighted.

When was the last time you tried it? Up until recently I have had issues but I’ve been using it for the last few days and it feels good now. All of the problems I had with it the last few times I’ve tried it (drag and drop not working, copy-paste being weird, fractional scaling) have seemingly been fixed.

It’s not actually based on the year. There have been 21 other major releases at various intervals starting with 1.0 in 2006. It just happens to be close to the current year right now.

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Brave has their own translation using Lingvanex.

That was part of my reason for linking it, and also why I put “convert” in quotes. It really is just Arch pre-configured and with some themes and some extra utilities.

I actually didn’t know they had their own repo until I took a look yesterday and not only is it tiny but it seems to be mostly themes, configs, and/or tools. I don’t think they even have alt versions of existing packages, just additions.

If you want to be really cheeky it is quite easy to “convert” EndeavourOS into Arch.

A major difference is Manjaro has its own repos which has a tendency to break AUR packages, while EndeavourOS uses the normal Arch repos. Endeavour is pretty much just pre-configured Arch so it bypasses a lot of the issues with security and stability that Manhjaro suffers from.

IMO I still think people should just use vanilla Arch so they can customize everything to the fullest but EndeavourOS is a decent option.