X11 is a legacy display protocol with no standardized native HDR support. While there are some experimental patches, only Wayland offers widely adopted, production-ready HDR capabilities.
As of Xfce 4.20.1 (released April 26, 2026), the desktop environment maintains full X11 compatibility and offers experimental Wayland session support. Note that xfwm4 has not been ported to Wayland; an external compositor such as Labwc or Wayfire is required.
Wayland sessions support HDR output when running on a graphics stack that implements the VK_EXT_swapchain_colorspace and VK_EXT_hdr_metadata Vulkan extensions. While these extensions are technically compatible with Vulkan 1.0, all production-ready HDR implementations in Linux require drivers that support at least Vulkan 1.2.
Verified working configurations:
AMD GPUs (GCN 3+): Mesa RADV 25.1+
Intel GPUs (Gen 9+): Mesa ANV 25.1+
NVIDIA GPUs (Maxwell+): NVIDIA proprietary driver 595+
Quote:
Originally Posted by blue_devil
What about XFCE?
|