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.)
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).
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...
Baselight is another major platform for color grading that runs on Linux.
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.
So what is around now that I don't want to wait 10 years for?
[1]cslight differences may occur
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.
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.
Generally it's NVIDIA hardware on Red Hat.