I’ve been using Linux Mint exclusively for a year and a half now, and I’ve gotten pretty used to the ecosystem, but I don’t want to have to wait another year for them to implement HDR support for video playback. I also don’t want to go through the effort of fully swapping distros (don’t have time to completely reorganize my workflow at the moment, etc.).

Does anyone have a recommendation for a distro that I could run in RAM from a USB stick with an up-to-date version of KDE Plasma or another DE when I want to watch HDR movies?

Or, if I’m overthinking this and there’s another obvious, simpler solution, please feel free to let me know that as well.

Edit: I thought about running Alpine Linux in RAM, but I’d have to reinstall Plasma every time I rebooted since I’m pretty sure it doesn’t come with a DE by default.

Edit 2: Thanks for all of the helpful comments everyone! For those asking, live USB are usually pretty slow and clunky in my experience when they run from the USB stick, and I wasn’t sure if that would interfere with video playback.

I think I’m just going to try a KDE Neon live USB and see if I can get HDR video working that way, without trying to run it from RAM. Thanks again!

  • CyborganismEnglish
    0•1 day ago

    What you could do is set up a chroot jail and use debootstrap to create a bootstrap system. Then put the sources.list for Debian Sid and run apt install kde-plasma-desktop

    Mount /proc and /dev in the chroot jail.

    Then go to a text terminal (alt-f3) and stop your login manager service.

    Chroot into your debian sid chroot and start the x server with start (I think)

    These steps might not work but it’s kind of a roadmap of how i would do it.