GNOME 50 Merges "sdr-native" Color Mode Support For Wide Color Gamut Displays

Written by Michael Larabel in GNOME on 17 February 2026 at 08:53 PM EST. 19 Comments

As a late stage change for GNOME 50 ahead of its official debut next month and following last week's GNOME 50 beta is plumbing the Mutter compositor for a new "sdr-native" color mode option.

Prominent Linux graphics-related developer Michel Dänzer of Red Hat implemented this sdr-native color mode that managed to land in time for GNOME 50. This sdr-native color mode is an alternative to the default and BT2100 modes currently available. Michel explained in the Mutter pull request:

"It uses the EDID information about primaries, default white point and gamma exponent. It's exposed only if all 3 are available in EDID.

It's available only via gdctl yet. There are some limitations at this point, in particular direct scanout won't work (unless the client happens to use the Wayland color management protocol with the exact same image description as the output).

It allows making full use of wide colour gamut displays (and displaying sRGB contents correctly on them) even without HDR."

Enabling this mode with the latest GNOME 50 Mutter Git code requires using gdctl --color-mode sdr-native. At least for the GNOME 50 release it doesn't look like the integration will extend beyond that and as noted does require the monitor to expose all the necessary EDID information to enjoy this new color mode for making full use of wide color gamut diplays.

A nice albeit late addition for GNOME 50.