Wayland Color Management Protocol Might Finally Be Close To Merging

In what could be a wonderful holiday for the Linux desktop, it looks like the Wayland color management protocol might finally be close to merging after four years in discussion.

Going all the way back to January 2020 has been the color management protocol proposal for allowing Wayland clients to know the color properties of outputs and to inform the compositor about the color properties of their content on surfaces.

There have been work-in-progress implementations of the Wayland color management support for KDE KWin, GNOME Mutter, and Wayland's Weston. There is also tentative code for Mesa drivers and toolkits like GTK and Qt. The Weston code in fact was merged three months ago already.

The Wayland color management protocol work has been a long time coming as one can see by scrolling through the Wayland-Protocols merge request.

But as pointed out by a Phoronix reader this week, it looks like it could soon potentially be ready... Prominent Wayland developer Pekka Paalane this past week finally gave his "ACK" (acknowledgment) on the behalf of the Weston compositor support for it. This follows Pekka noting two days ago that there are no more open merge requests against this for the first staging issue.

So going off the latest merge request activity, there's some cautious optimism that the staging-level support for Wayland color management might soon be ready... Let's hope for some nice holiday cheer.