Some day it will make it’s way to banking apps/sites being unusable on OSes other than approved “secure” ones.

That day was years ago. Many banking apps refuse to start if you even just have your bootloader unlocked, and some banking websites only support Chrome, some really crappy ones even only Chrome or Edge on Windows specifically.

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

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

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

SteamVR in Flatpak functions but you will get rediced performance because it can’t set CAP_SYS_NICE for vrcompositor. I haven’t checked if setting it manually could work though

Nah, for most people SteamVR works ootb with the Index… but SteamVR is also quite buggy.