I've been trying to get HDR working smoothly on Linux, and I know Windows has its issues with it—like having to tweak SDR content brightness and some games looking overly bright even when setting HDR in-game. I've heard that some Linux distros, like Bazzite, might perform better with HDR. Is that true, and what are the best practices for getting HDR to work properly in games on Linux?
3 Answers
I've heard good things about HDR on Wayland, though I can't say from personal experience since I don’t have an HDR display. X11 seems to have a lot of limitations for this.
If you're using KDE on Wayland, HDR support is pretty solid! Just ensure you enable Wayland in your Proton or Steam settings like this: `PROTON_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 PROTON_ENABLE_HDR=1 %command%`. Also, proton-cachyos is a good option to enhance your experience, but be cautious as it’s a bit more advanced to set up.
I’m not sure if I can use CachyOS Proton on other distros since I find Bazzite more user-friendly and stable than Mint.
KDE Plasma allows you to tweak HDR brightness and SDR color intensity quite well. After some adjustments, I found that only one game got a brightness bump of about 5%, which I can manually adjust without much hassle. From my experience, HDR on Linux has been better than what I've encountered on Windows, especially with Nobara and KDE Plasma.
Is this the same process for Bazzite too?