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Comment by nitrogen | Hacker News Reader

Linux is a first class platform for many of the atypical apps that would benefit from higher bit depths.

I’m seeing a lot of web discussions like this: https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/topic/771081/30-bit-depth...

Can you find an example of someone talking about using 10 bits/channel color displays on Linux in practice, and having it behave properly? What kind of work are they using it for? (Maybe my google-fu is deficient, but all I can find are people complaining about compatibility problems and Nvidia marketing materials.)

Compositing and grading for VFX/film. Most high-end VFX studios use Linux.

With what software?

Davinci Resolve is what Company 3 uses (The Martian, Spectre, Jurassic World, etc). It's available on Mac and Linux, but the big shops use the Linux version as they can expand it allowing for more real time nodes.

Baselight is another major platform for color grading that runs on Linux.

Resolve, Nuke, Flame, etc

I worked for a company that performed stereoscopic conversion for Hollywood films. Their primary tool was NUKE [1] running on Linux. It's also available for Mac and Windows, but because NUKE encompassed their entire workflow, the underlying OS wasn't especially important.

[1] http://www.thefoundry.co.uk/products/nuke/

Linux workstations have been the preferred platform for high-end finishing applications like NUKE, Flame and Baselight for years.

Generally it's NVIDIA hardware on Red Hat.

If there's one problem this thread makes me want to solve it's the undiscoverability of the unknown. 99.9+% of software is stuff most of us have never heard of, but we don't know what to search for because we don't know how to know what we don't already know. 99% of business opportunities we might have are invisible to us because we don't know how or where to look. 99+% of the dating population is out of reach of each other because of path dependence problems -- their lives simply won't ever intersect.

If I had my own startup accelerator, tonight (and only tonight ;-) ) this would be my RFS#1. Solve the knowledge bootstrapping problem. Google clearly failed to link 30-bit to VFX.

More or less what I thought reading down this thread. 'New' tech in the consumer market is tech from 10+ years in specialized trades (4K in 2002 from an earlier comment, touchsreen on your Win8 box? Had touchscreen on the retail POS 10 years ago[1]).

So what is around now that I don't want to wait 10 years for?

[1]cslight differences may occur

I've been thinking about this problem on and off for several years (including a startup with an alpha version a couple of years ago).

It's especially important in learning.

How do you organize and present information in a way that finding things most important/natural/easy/interesting to you isn't limited by dissipation of such information through old-fashioned network effects.

No matter what, I think you must first build a knowledge graph. One example that was recently posted to HN is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10468732. Maybe it could be crowdsourced or generated by mining Wikipedia.

Then you need some way for people to find out where they are on that knowledge graph, and a recommendation engine for where to go next. I also think it would be useful to mix in a few random topic nodes that are some number of hops away from a person's current knowledge, plus occasionally a completely random topic of the day.

But that's just the most trivial beginning to an enormous problem.

I'm glad there are others who think the same way! Like always, probably more topic-specific solutions will lead the way to a hopefully universal collection of knowledge.

One way to think of it is as a very early precursor to the civilization bootstrapping kits included on starships in Vernor Vinge's Zones of Thought novels (particularly The Children of the Sky).

Back in 2002 I worked on some plugins for a color grading system that supported 4K.

Internally it processed color in 12 bits per channel and I think it supported 10bit color output.

This was running Linux with NVidia GPUs and was totally amazing to see 4K footage being graded in realtime.

That system is now called Baselight and AFAIK it is one of the best: http://www.filmlight.ltd.uk/products/baselight/overview_bl.p...

In the last few months, I've used 30-bit color on Gentoo in the context of microscopy and data visualization.

Enabling it with a modern NVidia card is dead easy. Basically, in xorg.conf, replace occurrences of 24 with 30. However, not much makes use of the extra colors. Although Qt5 will correctly output 24-bit color in 30-bit mode, Krita is the only Linux application of any kind I found that can actually display additional colors. It's easy to test - show a full screen gradient.

No OpenGL compositors (eg kwin, compiz) support 30-bit color to any extent. Total fail, here. Tearing like it's 1998.

Notably, with Qt5, it does work to make 10-10-10-2 and 10-10-10-0 GL contexts and render to them with your own old-school GL calls, nv_path_drawing, and compat & core profile shaders. However, you do have to manage the GL context yourself - QOpenGLWidget has no 10-bit suppport. You can still use Qt's GL abstractions, just not QOpenGLWidget. Easiest approach is to use QWindow in a widget container (created with that QWidget.createContainersomethingorother static member function), as was commonly done with Qt 5.3 (ie, before QOpenGLWidget).

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