Add HDR support

Wish list
1

As a regular KDE user, I’ve been trying Budgie for several weeks now, and so far it’s been a really great experience! It’s a truly clean and well-designed environment. :slight_smile:

Unfortunately, Budgie is missing one critical feature: HDR display support.
When you have an HDR display (especially an OLED display), it’s really night and day. It’s truely hard to go back to a conventional/SDR display after trying it. ^^

Gnome finally started supporting HDR with 25.04 (but only for content, if I understand correctly, which is a good first step), and KDE has fully supported it for at least 1-2 years.
For KDE, it’s like Windows; even the desktop environment can be HDR: the result: a brighter screen, better contrast, better readability in bright environments, and more vivid colors. Truely night and day.

It would be nice if Budgie would consider adding HDR support (a full support like KDE if possible), because unfortunately it’s the only feature that makes me hesitate between continuing on Budgie or returning to KDE.

2

The next version of budgie will be wayland only and we will be using a wlroots based compositor.

HDR support was added in march this year.
So when compositors uplift to the latest wlroots, budgie will then benefit.

So likely in 26.04 LTS timescales. We’ll likely have a 25.10 PPA available during the 26.04 development cycle which will hold the latest compositor when it becomes available. This will allow experienced testers to help out.

1 Like
3

Awesome ! I’ll be happy to help testing it when it becomes available :slight_smile: Do you plan to make it available via the backports PPA or another way ?

4

We’ll cover this as part of the regular next release development & testing thread.