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.
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".
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.
>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?
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.
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.
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