The problem with HDR is that it’s very difficult to get working on X11, to the point that those who tried (NVIDIA, 8 years ago) gave up long time ago and moved on. X11/Xorg is legacy solution that is still there mostly because it always was and things still depend on it.
Wayland can get HDR and it gradually does, but it wasn’t priority for quite a long time as there was much more basic stuff missing, to the point many users wouldn’t switch until recently, and because X was still the preferred display system for most users for such a long time, it wasn’t priority to fill missing gaps on Wayland side and it wasn’t moving forward too fast.
Now that things are coming together, over half of the user base (probably) already switched to Wayland, there are more desktop/WM options on the Wayland side, with fewer showstoppers every year, finally NVIDIA drivers start working on Wayland, color management is also getting closer to be part of the official spec. It’s already possible to play games in HDR, but with some solvable caveats: if a game runs on X11 (which for Wine/Proton the Wayland driver is still experimental) they use swap-chain hack to that’s only available in the gamescope compositor, so either in full blown Steak Deck session or wrapped in nested gamescope instance. This will be more out-of-box when:
the stable color management protocol is actually in place, more compositors implement it (currently only gamescope and kwin_wayland have HDR)
winewayland.drv stabilizes and implements HDR
Wine and Proton run on Wayland natively by default
The problem with HDR is that it’s very difficult to get working on X11, to the point that those who tried (NVIDIA, 8 years ago) gave up long time ago and moved on. X11/Xorg is legacy solution that is still there mostly because it always was and things still depend on it.
Wayland can get HDR and it gradually does, but it wasn’t priority for quite a long time as there was much more basic stuff missing, to the point many users wouldn’t switch until recently, and because X was still the preferred display system for most users for such a long time, it wasn’t priority to fill missing gaps on Wayland side and it wasn’t moving forward too fast.
Now that things are coming together, over half of the user base (probably) already switched to Wayland, there are more desktop/WM options on the Wayland side, with fewer showstoppers every year, finally NVIDIA drivers start working on Wayland, color management is also getting closer to be part of the official spec. It’s already possible to play games in HDR, but with some solvable caveats: if a game runs on X11 (which for Wine/Proton the Wayland driver is still experimental) they use swap-chain hack to that’s only available in the gamescope compositor, so either in full blown Steak Deck session or wrapped in nested gamescope instance. This will be more out-of-box when:
See windows drives me insane, but this probably would too