3 ms·

Wayland Color Management Protocol Might Be Close to Merging

64 points by voxadam 2y ago

formerly_proven 2y ago
In one way this is very good because it adopts a sane model for color management (unlike X11 and Windows). In another way it's pretty weird that Wayland, designed in the late 2000s, made no provisions for something other than 8-bit and "presume sRGB".
- cyberax 2y ago
  It's more like Wayland itself doesn't care much about what surfaces contain. The new protocol allows Wayland apps to communicate the information about color spaces and to request color transformations. Arguably, this should have been added from the start. On the other hand, HDR displays were basically non-existent in 2000-s. It's unlikely that developers could have gotten everything right without ever testing the protocols.
  - orbital-decay 2y ago
    Color management is not just for HDR displays. It's one of the reasons creatives always leaned toward Macs - system-wide color management has been a thing for ages there. Wayland wasn't initially designed with it in mind because they haven't consulted their supposed userbase for their use cases, instead focusing on a narrow problem space that was understandable for them personally, and codifying their assumptions. It's basically another case of "falsehoods programmers believe about X".
    - kelnos 2y ago
      This is the thing that has always confused me about the path of Wayland's development. A lot of the original designers and implementers had worked on X11 and/or GUI toolkits for years prior to starting to build Wayland, but there's so much missing (like color management has been) that it feels like all those people somehow forgot all their experience when they started working on Wayland. I suppose it could be that their experience taught them to build something minimal and then extend things later, but I think that approach has done Wayland a lot of reputational harm over the years.
      - beeflet 2y ago
        >I think that approach has done Wayland a lot of reputational harm over the years. Only if you consider Wayland to be a finished complete replacement for X11 — which distros have... oops! The reality is that in linux, the users act like developers (in the sense that they know how to fill out bug reports) so they get treated like developers and dogfooded. From a business perspective, distros like Fedora are basically testing for RHL, no?
      - throw16180339 2y ago
        I'll invoke Cunningham's Law here. If I remember correctly, Wayland was designed to support a wider range of display targets than X11, such as set-top displays, car dashboards, and other specialized systems. In these cases, the full functionality of a traditional desktop environment isn't required, so it isn't included in the base system.
        formerly_proven 2y ago
        I kinda had this "wayland was actually designed for embedded use cases and [therefore lots of things don't matter]" also in the back of my mind, but I failed to find any evidence at all for this actually being the case. Nevermind that embedded Linux generally didn't use X11 back then and doesn't use Wayland today.
        thatfunkymunki 2y ago
        Automotive infotainment displays are almost entirely Wayland now
        hulitu 2y ago
        Because they don't run any programs and you basically have QT on your automotive screen.
      - Dylan16807 2y ago
        > I suppose it could be that their experience taught them to build something minimal and then extend things later, but I think that approach has done Wayland a lot of reputational harm over the years. Even then, I'd expect color gamut and depth support to be a top priority, second major release, sort of feature. ...Why does the wikipedia page for Wayland say that color management was added in 2013?
    - pjmlp 2y ago
      Creatives with money. There are more creatives in the world than those that fit into 10% desktop market, and in the 90's, Apple had even less, in a world where Atari, Amiga and Acorn also existed.
  - Avamander 2y ago
    Maybe not HDR displays, but we had plenty that had lower bit-depths. Windows 11 still supports dithering even. It basically works in both directions if you want any chance of having a resemblance of accurate color reproduction.
  - koito17 2y ago
    Displays with a wider color gamut than sRGB -- the average of a sample of early-to-mid 90s CRT displays -- have existed for decades now. Not to mention, Mac OS X supported color management (and exporting color profiles) since its first public release in 2001. Even today, it's trivial on a Mac to e.g. connect a monitor and export its color profile into an ICC file, which can then embed into a QuickTime container, PNG image, etc.
    - cyberax 2y ago
      I don't think I've seen more than 8-bit monitors before mid-2010-s, except for some DICOM-specialized grayscale monitors. > Even today, it's trivial on a Mac to e.g. connect a monitor and export its color profile into an ICC file And you can use the ICC profiles in Wayland: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/ICC_profiles#Wayland https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/ICC_profiles#Wayland This capability has existed for a long time. The protocols being merged allow _each_ _application_ to work within its own color profile, including more-than-8-bit colors, exposing this information to the composer. The composer can then dynamically translate the color formats, according to the output capabilities. So if you move a window from an HDR-capable external screen to a laptop's crappy LCD, you'll get reasonable image, instead of a black window (or a washed out image).
      - adgjlsfhk1 2y ago
        color space and bit depth aren't the same. you can have 8 bit P3 vs 8 bit SRGB (etc). A colorspace is a combination of a whitepoint, a gamma transform, your color primaries, and a bit depth.
        ykonstant 2y ago
        What is a good, concise resource for all this stuff for the interested layman? I am not familiar with anything but the very basic "RGB" and know basically nothing about how video screens really work.
        cyberax 2y ago
shrubble 2y ago
Hasn't X11 had this for longer than Wayland has even been in existence? See for instance https://tronche.com/gui/x/xlib/color/ https://tronche.com/gui/x/xlib/color/
- beeflet 2y ago
  Not a lot of people realize this, but X11 actually predates Wayland. So I'm glad you pointed that out :P
  - snapplebobapple 2y ago
    are you sure? W comes before X....................................................................................................................
    - yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
      Yes, it did! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W_Window_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W_Window_System (Note that W and Wayland are wholly unrelated)
      - snapplebobapple 2y ago
        [flagged]
- jacooper 2y ago
  Duh. The entire point of wayland is replace x11.
  - njtransit 2y ago
    I think the point is that X had this feature when Wayland was launched 16 years ago. That’s not exactly an inspiring pace of development.
    - 2y ago
hulitu 2y ago
> Wayland Color Management Protocol Might Be Close to Merging might. Call us when it is.

64 points by voxadam 2y ago

In one way this is very good because it adopts a sane model for color management (unlike X11 and Windows). In another way it's pretty weird that Wayland, designed in the late 2000s, made no provisions for something other than 8-bit and "presume sRGB".

cyberax 2y ago
It's more like Wayland itself doesn't care much about what surfaces contain. The new protocol allows Wayland apps to communicate the information about color spaces and to request color transformations. Arguably, this should have been added from the start. On the other hand, HDR displays were basically non-existent in 2000-s. It's unlikely that developers could have gotten everything right without ever testing the protocols.
- orbital-decay 2y ago
  Color management is not just for HDR displays. It's one of the reasons creatives always leaned toward Macs - system-wide color management has been a thing for ages there. Wayland wasn't initially designed with it in mind because they haven't consulted their supposed userbase for their use cases, instead focusing on a narrow problem space that was understandable for them personally, and codifying their assumptions. It's basically another case of "falsehoods programmers believe about X".
  - kelnos 2y ago
    This is the thing that has always confused me about the path of Wayland's development. A lot of the original designers and implementers had worked on X11 and/or GUI toolkits for years prior to starting to build Wayland, but there's so much missing (like color management has been) that it feels like all those people somehow forgot all their experience when they started working on Wayland. I suppose it could be that their experience taught them to build something minimal and then extend things later, but I think that approach has done Wayland a lot of reputational harm over the years.
    - beeflet 2y ago
      >I think that approach has done Wayland a lot of reputational harm over the years. Only if you consider Wayland to be a finished complete replacement for X11 — which distros have... oops! The reality is that in linux, the users act like developers (in the sense that they know how to fill out bug reports) so they get treated like developers and dogfooded. From a business perspective, distros like Fedora are basically testing for RHL, no?
    - throw16180339 2y ago
      I'll invoke Cunningham's Law here. If I remember correctly, Wayland was designed to support a wider range of display targets than X11, such as set-top displays, car dashboards, and other specialized systems. In these cases, the full functionality of a traditional desktop environment isn't required, so it isn't included in the base system.
      - formerly_proven 2y ago
        I kinda had this "wayland was actually designed for embedded use cases and [therefore lots of things don't matter]" also in the back of my mind, but I failed to find any evidence at all for this actually being the case. Nevermind that embedded Linux generally didn't use X11 back then and doesn't use Wayland today.
        thatfunkymunki 2y ago
        Automotive infotainment displays are almost entirely Wayland now
        hulitu 2y ago
        Because they don't run any programs and you basically have QT on your automotive screen.
    - Dylan16807 2y ago
      > I suppose it could be that their experience taught them to build something minimal and then extend things later, but I think that approach has done Wayland a lot of reputational harm over the years. Even then, I'd expect color gamut and depth support to be a top priority, second major release, sort of feature. ...Why does the wikipedia page for Wayland say that color management was added in 2013?
  - pjmlp 2y ago
    Creatives with money. There are more creatives in the world than those that fit into 10% desktop market, and in the 90's, Apple had even less, in a world where Atari, Amiga and Acorn also existed.
- Avamander 2y ago
  Maybe not HDR displays, but we had plenty that had lower bit-depths. Windows 11 still supports dithering even. It basically works in both directions if you want any chance of having a resemblance of accurate color reproduction.
- koito17 2y ago
  Displays with a wider color gamut than sRGB -- the average of a sample of early-to-mid 90s CRT displays -- have existed for decades now. Not to mention, Mac OS X supported color management (and exporting color profiles) since its first public release in 2001. Even today, it's trivial on a Mac to e.g. connect a monitor and export its color profile into an ICC file, which can then embed into a QuickTime container, PNG image, etc.
  - cyberax 2y ago
    I don't think I've seen more than 8-bit monitors before mid-2010-s, except for some DICOM-specialized grayscale monitors. > Even today, it's trivial on a Mac to e.g. connect a monitor and export its color profile into an ICC file And you can use the ICC profiles in Wayland: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/ICC_profiles#Wayland https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/ICC_profiles#Wayland This capability has existed for a long time. The protocols being merged allow _each_ _application_ to work within its own color profile, including more-than-8-bit colors, exposing this information to the composer. The composer can then dynamically translate the color formats, according to the output capabilities. So if you move a window from an HDR-capable external screen to a laptop's crappy LCD, you'll get reasonable image, instead of a black window (or a washed out image).
    - adgjlsfhk1 2y ago
      color space and bit depth aren't the same. you can have 8 bit P3 vs 8 bit SRGB (etc). A colorspace is a combination of a whitepoint, a gamma transform, your color primaries, and a bit depth.
      - ykonstant 2y ago
        What is a good, concise resource for all this stuff for the interested layman? I am not familiar with anything but the very basic "RGB" and know basically nothing about how video screens really work.
        cyberax 2y ago

shrubble 2y ago

Hasn't X11 had this for longer than Wayland has even been in existence? See for instance https://tronche.com/gui/x/xlib/color/ https://tronche.com/gui/x/xlib/color/

beeflet 2y ago
Not a lot of people realize this, but X11 actually predates Wayland. So I'm glad you pointed that out :P
- snapplebobapple 2y ago
  are you sure? W comes before X....................................................................................................................
  - yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
    Yes, it did! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W_Window_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W_Window_System (Note that W and Wayland are wholly unrelated)
    - snapplebobapple 2y ago
      [flagged]
jacooper 2y ago
Duh. The entire point of wayland is replace x11.
- njtransit 2y ago
  I think the point is that X had this feature when Wayland was launched 16 years ago. That’s not exactly an inspiring pace of development.
  - 2y ago

hulitu 2y ago

> Wayland Color Management Protocol Might Be Close to Merging might. Call us when it is.