I’m seeing a lot of old posts about how Linux has poor support for OLED. Is this still the case? Should I avoid OLED laptops?

  • Max-P ( Max_P@lemmy.max-p.me ) 
    4·
    3 years ago

    The only issues I can find online are related to brightness control, which has always been an occasional problem on laptops regardless of the display technology. It’s happened and keeps happening with LCD panels too.

    In a technical sense 99% of the time the kernel is not even involved in the process. The display output is driven by the GPU, and even then, it drives pretty standard protocols like DVI/HDMI/DP. Even laptops typically work with some sort of internal DVI/DP connector for the panel, which has its own decoder made for the actual OLED panel. The only outlier is brightness control which is sometimes done in a weird hacky way by manufacturers, wherever is more convenient for them. Some do it with ACPI calls, some do it through the GPU (intel_brightness), some do it through proprietary registers or I2C/SPI bus.

    It’s a “try it and see” kind of situation that depends on the precise hardware combination of a given laptop. Being an OLED might make it more likely by manufacturers to end up with a less standard brightness control, but it’s not an OLED-specific problem and I doubt we’ll ever see a “all OLEDs are now fixed forever”. We might see brightness fixed on this particular laptop from this manufacturer.

  • MXX53 ( MXX53@programming.dev ) 
    3·
    3 years ago

    I wish I had something to contribute to answer this question, but I have not owned an oled monitor to test this on. But I would be curious to see if there is a difference between oled on linux and not. I have seen some people mention poor color accuracy when using amd cards in Linux, but I also have been unable to test this.

  • lemillionsocks ( lemillionsocks@beehaw.org ) 
    1·
    3 years ago

    I have my desktop plugged into an OLED tv right now it runs fine and looks good. Do you mean HDR specifically? HDR doesnt work but it does seem like there’s finally movement in that space with valve and others pushing for support. I think last news I heard about it was this thing.

    So if you want to know if there would be a problem with an OLED screen and true blacks and all that then rest assured you’re good, but HDR will not work and probably wont in the near future.

    That said while you’re searching around I suggest searching the model thoroughly before pulling the trigger on the buy. Laptops have a lot of esoteric hardware and acpi which means even if the big pieces should be fully compatible it might not be. Also Ive heard good things about framework but dont own one.