Quick guide on getting HDR10 working in Google Chrome on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS (KDE Plasma 6 Wayland) with NVIDIA (tested on RTX 2080, nvidia-driver-595-open).

1. Set Persistent Environment Variable

KDE Plasma 6 requires ENABLE_HDR_WSI=1 to expose Wayland/Vulkan HDR protocol interfaces to Chromium.

In ~/.config/environment.d/hdr.conf:

ENABLE_HDR_WSI=1

And add to ~/.bashrc:

export ENABLE_HDR_WSI=1

2. Configure Chrome Flags

Add the following to ~/.config/chrome-flags.conf:

--ozone-platform=wayland
--use-gl=egl
--force-color-profile=scrgb-linear
--enable-features=UseSkiaRenderer,ColorManagement,HasHDRHeadroom

3. Critical Gotchas (Why it might still fail)

1. The .desktop Shortcut Trap: Even with flags configured, launching Chrome from the KDE Application Menu / Start Menu often fails because ~/.local/share/applications/google-chrome.desktop hardcodes --ozone-platform=x11.
   • Fix: Edit ~/.local/share/applications/google-chrome.desktop, change all Exec= lines from --ozone-platform=x11 to --ozone-platform=wayland, then run: update-desktop-database ~/.local/share/applications and kbuildsycoca6
2. Master Process Lock-in: Closing browser windows leaves the Chrome master process running. If it started under X11, newly opened windows stay on X11.
   • Fix: Always hard kill before testing new flags: killall -9 chrome google-chrome google-chrome-stable
3. Type-C to HDMI Adapters:
   • A Cable Matters USB-C (DP 1.4 Alt Mode) to HDMI 2.1 adapter (Model 201428) works on Windows (driving 4K 120Hz 10-bit HDR), but it doesn't work on this build of Linux (fails to expose the HDR toggle in KDE display settings).
   • Connecting directly via the native GPU HDMI 2.0b port immediately allowed HDR to be enabled.

Current Observations / Quality Notes

• ⚠️ Color Banding in Video & PQ Images ⚠️:
  • In YouTube HDR playback (e.g. The World in 4K HDR), noticeable color banding appears in bright sky gradients.
  • The same banding is present in static PQ-encoded HDR AVIF images (which render completely smooth in Chrome on Windows and macOS).
  • Caveat: I suspect this might be related to the RTX 2080 being limited to native HDMI 2.0b bandwidth, and my Samsung S95F TV does not have DisplayPort inputs to test higher uncompressed bandwidth on Linux. (4K 60Hz 4:4:4 10-bit requires ~20.05 Gbps, which exceeds the 18.0 Gbps bandwidth limit of HDMI 2.0b and forces chroma subsampling or 8-bit output with dithering).

remote: Enumerating objects: 934, done.

remote: Counting objects: 100% (133/133), done.

remote: Compressing objects: 100% (95/95), done.

Receiving objects: 41% (390/934), 122.18 MiB | 66.00 KiB/s

Normally cloning a repo takes 10 s, but now it has been running for 10 minutes and it's only at 41%

Yes I am aware of Git LFS. My repo is quite big with a lot of source code.

So I would like to hear from some of you, how many KB/s or MB/s you are getting when doing a git clone from GitHub. Thanks.

Hi, I wrote a blog post detailing how Android and iOS handle HDR apps. Feel free to comment below regarding the HDR experience on your Android phones !😄 I am curious to know how phones like the S26 handle Lightroom for example (does it give an HDR ratio of 5.0, or 8.0?)