What kind of flickering? Does the display support adaptive sync? If so, try turning that off

I wouldn’t read that much into it. Valve isn’t Nintendo, I doubt they’d launch a new Deck without OLED

Also, your blog is fantastic, I’m always happy when there’s a new post =)

Thank you, I’m glad you like it!

I feel like in SDR mode, the OLED is pushing brighter images. I almost feel like it’s underselling the capabilities at 270, but does so to give pixels a rest every now and then, in the hope that the bright spots don’t stay stationary on the screen. It’s a wild guess, I have no idea.

It’s certainly possible, displays do whacky stuff sometimes. For example, if the maximum brightness in the HDR metadata matches exactly what the display says would be ideal to use, my (LCD!) HDR monitor dims down a lot, making everything far, far less bright than it actually should be.

KWin has a workaround for that, but it might be that your display does the same thing with the reported average brightness.

I understand that it’s an absolute brightness standard, not like the relative levels in SDR

The standard is also relative brightness actually, though displays (luckily) don’t implement it that way.

why does it end up washing out colors unless I amplify them in kwin? Is just the brightness absolute in nits, but not the color?

It depends. You might

• have a driver bug. Right now only AMD has correct color space communication with the display, that doesn’t work correctly on Intel and NVidia yet
• have a display that does a terrible job at mapping the rec.2020 color space to the display
• be just used to the oversaturated colors you get with the display in SDR mode

Why does my screen block the brightness control in HDR mode but not contrast?

Because displays are stupid, don’t assume there’s always a logical reason behind what display manufacturers do. Mine only blocks the brightness setting through DDC/CI, but not through the monitor OSD…

Why is my average emission capped at 270nits, that seems ridiculously low even for normal SDR screens as comparison

OLED simply gets very hot when you make it bright over the whole area, the display technology is inherently limited when it comes to high brightness on big displays

Yes, for now someone has to be logged in and have the server running

To maybe prevent a catastrophe: The system is not able to restore virtual desktop assignments yet, it only starts the apps you had open before.

Just click the button in the sddm settings page

That’s just a law of computers, the default arrangement of monitors must always be wrong.

You can just sync your Plasma settings to SDDM though, and it’ll use the same output settings as your session

Fedora just has

polkit.addRule(function(action, subject) {
    if ((action.id == "org.freedesktop.packagekit.package-install" ||
         action.id == "org.freedesktop.packagekit.package-remove") &&
        subject.active == true && subject.local == true &&
        subject.isInGroup("wheel")) {
            return polkit.Result.YES;
    }
});

in /usr/share/polkit-1/rules.d/org.freedesktop.packagekit.rules. If you put the same file in there, it should work.

Yes, and many distros have a polkit rule set up to allow installing or updating without a password. You can likely just copy it from Fedora or sth

Just use Wayland, then you don’t have to care about this

Setting the speed to the max does turn them off

The only effects relevant for performance are blur and background contrast. Turn those off if you feel the system is slow, maybe increase the animation speed and you’re done

You can probably implement it in the script itself, but there’s no external functionality to do it

Almost every output setting “may seriously break things” in my experience. Display drivers are sadly quite fragile

Changing the output config file should work, as long as KWin isn’t running while you make the change (in which case the change will just be overridden)

Edit: Also, please make a bug report about this for KWin. It’s probably not a KWin issue, but we can usually figure out where it’s coming from

Many monitors allow you to turn off HDR, they just claim they don’t support it to the computer when you do that

I was especially surprised to find that Gnome would turn the screen around correctly by itself. With KDE Plasma I had to set the correct screen orientation myself. And unfortunately Plasma also did not come with any on screen keyboard so it was effectively unusable.

You just need to use a distro that follows our upstream defaults - namely Wayland, and having the virtual keyboard Maliit installed by default - then everything will work out of the box with KDE Plasma too.

I’m one of the KWin maintainers, I can tell you with absolute certainty that this hasn’t changed. Maybe you were on Xorg then?

No, they were always global. Scrolling on the desktop to change virtual desktops was disabled by default, but nothing changed about the three finger gestures