This Linux tool was the last thing I needed to wave goodbye to Windows

Linux! It’s the kernel at the heart of a sea of distros that all seek to answer one question: what if computers were fun again but also sometimes you abolished your graphics driver by typing “sudo zypper dup” while one or more repos were out of sync?

My journey with it has been ongoing: from dipping a tentative toe into Bazzite last year to completely ditching Windows in favour of openSUSE Tumbleweed (it has a chameleon, you see) a few weeks ago. But one thing has eluded me that entire time: working HDR.

I’ve done my best—which is not much—to get HDR to play ball with my LG OLED TV, but no dice. Notionally, there’s already a solution: the Gamescope micro-compositor that lets things run in HDR on your Steam Deck. Alas, as many Gamescope arguments as I fed into my Steam-game launch options, it just wouldn’t take. At best, nothing would change. At worst, HDR would attempt to work, but only turn the game in question into a washed-out mess.

But those days are behind me. Last weekend, I started to muck about with ScopeBuddy (and its civilised graphical frontend, ScopeBuddy-GUI), a tool—originally made for Bazzite, in fact—that’s designed to simplify those long, garbled strings of Gamescope arguments into simple command.

More importantly in my case, it has a setting that will (attempt to) automatically detect your monitor’s resolution, VRR-capability, and HDR settings and make games play ball with them, in a manner that’s really as simple as slapping “scb — %command%” into the launch options.

You can’t tell but Tux is thrilled at these developments. (Image credit: Future)

Installing it’s as easy as using a curl command and marking ScopeBuddy as executable (all of which is guided step-by-step on the GitHub), while ScopeBuddy-GUI is a couldn’t-be-simpler flatpak.

Once installed, you can just fire up the latter and set a global config that will apply to any game you launch with the “scopebuddy” or “scb” option, and you can also create app-specific configs to apply particular fixes to particular games. It rules. All of this is great.

It… works? It was incredibly easy? I didn’t really have to do anything? Alright, I can hear you already. ScopeBuddy’s been around for a whole year at this point: breaking news this is not. Still, as more and more people become Linux-curious, I feel duty-bound to call tools like this out.

HDR really was the last thing standing between me and a full embrace of Linux (mercifully, I don’t play any of those games that want to use kernel-level anticheat and therefore don’t work on Linux). I’ve finally overcome the last hurdle keeping from me ditching Windows forever.

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