this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2025
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@squid_slime what is “native OLED”? GNOME already supports OLED displays fine; I’ve been loving it on my Dell XPS 13 9310 with OLED. Do you mean like a full-black theme, or something? I don’t think that’s something upstream GNOME would implement since it can have other issues, like smearing. For the Shell, a custom theme could work but for apps it’s something that apps themselves would need to implement/support with Adwaita’s existing styling framework.
Pure black is what was meant, which turns out to be easy enough to implement using shell extension and extracting the CSS file.
I'm slowly eye balling a new monitor and I'm 100% going to get an OLED, my Samsung VA is on its last legs, it takes 30 minutes to warm up 😢.
So I'm curious why you want pure black. Is it a laptop so you're saving on battery? Or maybe pure black helps combat burn in when combined with monitor tools? Or you just like it, hah?
I'm using a pc and burn in is one of my biggest concerns. Power efficiency is a nice to have though and also its nice to have pure black just because its an oled else I would have bought an LCD
I don't think pure black prevents burn in so much as saves power given that OLED is self emissive. Burn in reduction is generally handled by the the OS via user interface pixel shifting, and at certain intervals through an automated routine at the display level.
To your point, you can achieve better power efficiency with an 'oled theme'. I'm not sure if GNOME desktop accommodates burn in mitigation based on display technology.
Using parts of the panel less will help to reduce burn in. Pixel shift is handled via my monitor and goes through a recalibration / health process after so many hours.
Anyway burn in will happen to all oled monitors so for longevity using pure blacks will mitigate and hopefully get a few more years out of the display.
It also just looks nice as a personal preference.