GTK Making Progress On HDR & Supporting More Color Spaces

Colors within the GTK toolkit have been represented to date using sRGB but developers have been working on supporting other color spaces like Display-P3 and BT.2100-PQ as they work to better support High Dynamic Range (HDR) displays on the Linux desktop.

Besides all the work being done on graphics drivers, compositors, and other elements of the Linux desktop stack, the GTK toolkit is also seeing work toward HDR handling. GTK developers have been introducing GdkColorState for supporting multiple / non-sRGB color spaces, supporting in-development Wayland color management protocols, and also working toward a color state aware rendering API, passing CSS color state data to the renderer, propagating color state information from the likes of GStreamer, and transitioning to linear compositing.

Some of these GTK HDR/color milestones may be met in time for the GTK 4.16 toolkit release but this remains a significant undertaking for the Linux desktop.

Those interested in learning more about this GTK effort around color spaces and HDR can see this GTK.org blog post by Red Hat's Matthias Clasen.