GNOME Work Moving Ahead On Deep Color Support, Triple Buffering

[Mez']

Not really, but they're related and one is necessary for the other. Deep Color allows for more than 8-bit per channel color and came with the HDMI 1.3 spec. High end 1080p TVs in the PS3 era had Deep Color. It's basically more HDMI bandwidth and color space. HDR, actual UHD spec HDR, is 10-bit color depth, wide color gamut, with brightness and contrast standards (and more) and came with HDMI 2.1...or one of the 2.0 subsets...

I don't really know the actual specifics and numbers of DC/HDR outside of that basic grasp of what they are, but I know that Deep Color is one of the big milestones on the way to HDR10/UHD/??? they want to call it. Everyone having their own buzzword gets old and confusing.

And the HDR story is basically this article and some older Phoronix articles about what they're working on. I have a 4K HDR TV that I'm using to post from Fedora. Unless things change soon, be prepared to dual-boot with Windows if you want to experience HDR content.

No need for Windows. The Netflix app on these TVs can play HDR content. Mine can for sure.
I don't think Amazon Prime has any, don't know about other video streaming services. I don't see many other use cases currently though. Maybe Blu-Ray?

[Mez']

Daniel van Vugt has also been active on the double cursor issue for 4K60 on Xorg.
When scaling to intermediate values (125-150-175), a second dead cursor appears somewhere random on your screen which seems to be inherited somehow from GDM. It's quite irritating.
There's some kind of trial and error workaround but it doesn't work consistently. So I really hope it will be solved.

[Guest]

Great stuff by vanvugt as always. It’s probably not ready for upstream review yet.

Same weekly reports also show good work on GNOME by other Canonical employees. Gone are the days of NIH and CLA.

Wel there's still snaps, I wonder when they'll declare that as a lost cause and adopt flatpak

[Guest]

I wish they'd just do triple buffering only. Android does it and it's been working great for the past 7-8 years, with no latency problems.

[skeevy420]

No need for Windows. The Netflix app on these TVs can play HDR content. Mine can for sure.
I don't think Amazon Prime has any, don't know about other video streaming services. I don't see many other use cases currently though. Maybe Blu-Ray?

Except for games. My TV can't play my games and they look noticeably better on Windows now. Especially games like Hitman 2 with actual HDR support.

What sucks is knowing that I have an Android TV powered by Linux. It makes me feel all "WTF Googles? Where muh HDR?"

[danielnez1]

tildearrow

Of course no one forces you to run fully QAed software from well known distributors. You can always choose to run some untested crap from github and hope nothing breaks.

QA, QA, QA, QA, QA. Get it?

API Documentation would make QA so much easier Plus documentation is software engineering 101.

[JackLilhammers]

By that definition then Canonical would have shipped a stock GNOME in Ubuntu.

It was a joke. Quite self evident.
By the way I'd really like Ubuntu shipping stock Gnome, just to see how well it would be received by a wide user base.
Maybe that way they'd start listening to user feedback a little more.

Compatibility is paramount in good software design. The fact that 144Hz doesn't want ANY sort of compatibility irks me.
I have gone through serious compatibility problems, like the famous error while loading shared libraries...

Of course I agree with you, and totally disagree with many of Gnome's design choices. Some of which I find abysmal.

Maybe 144Hz doesn't want customization and compatibily, but they're just their opinions.
And they're free to avoid any form of customization, and express their taste and opinions.
As long as they don't troll in other threads. But you already do a pretty good job at cleaning their trolling.

My issues are with the Gnome designers and devs, who seem to ignore the fundamental principles of software development you just cited, but I don't think that ranting here will have much of an effect

PS: I used generic pronouns because I don't know which are the ones preferred by 144Hz

[skeevy420]

JackLilhammers Personally I don’t care about customizations. Not for me. But the big distributors want to ship some.

And👏They👏All👏Use👏GNOME

Why you might ask? Because the extension system is a perfect fit for any distributor who want to ship a custom session. The maintenance is low and QA make It work.

Look at Mint who did the opposite and forked big code bases. They are stuck on old code now and can’t keep up. Ubuntu, RHEL, Pop! and others just rebase their GNOME every half year and do simple roundS of QA on their limited set of extensions.

Then there’s old and unmaintained code on github that crazy people assume will fit a fast moving target like GNOME upstream. Darwin has to deal with this level of stupidity.

In my experiences the only time you really have extension issues is when you run up-to-date distributions. Ones that push GNOME updates ASAP like Arch and Fedora. Distros like Ubuntu and OpenSUSE it's less of an issue since they stick to older versions for longer which allows plugin makers a lot more time to get their ducks in a row.

So, IMHO, the more you need GNOME customizations the more you should stick to distributions that don't push updates fast or use distribution that develops the plugin you like, like PopOS or Ubuntu. That sucks if you don't like those distros for whatever reason, but that's a compromise we have to make from time to time.

[Mez']

Except for games. My TV can't play my games and they look noticeably better on Windows now. Especially games like Hitman 2 with actual HDR support.

What sucks is knowing that I have an Android TV powered by Linux. It makes me feel all "WTF Googles? Where muh HDR?"

I'm not a hard gamer. And owning a RX 560 coupled to a A10-7860K I'm happy when I can play in 1080p... So I wasn't aware there was HDR support in some games.
Now, to play in 4K with HDR content, I suppose it's not a common use case either, given the hardware prices to get a smooth experience on such a demanding setup. It's still early adopter stuff. Doesn't change the fact that it's unfortunate that you can't take full advantage of it though.

[Zan Lynx]

I'm not a hard gamer. And owning a RX 560 coupled to a A10-7860K I'm happy when I can play in 1080p... So I wasn't aware there was HDR support in some games.
Now, to play in 4K with HDR content, I suppose it's not a common use case either, given the hardware prices to get a smooth experience on such a demanding setup. It's still early adopter stuff. Doesn't change the fact that it's unfortunate that you can't take full advantage of it though.

I would even say there is HDR support in most games these days. All of the major game engines adopted it as the internal color space. Then they transform it to the output display. With this method it is easy for them to do fancy effects like a dark tunnel with a bright entrance, and as the character leaves the tunnel the tunnel gets very dark and the outdoors becomes less bright. This simulates the human pupil response.

Then of course if they have an HDR output display they don't transform anything. This results in some interesting benchmarks where a game runs slightly faster with HDR.