OLED alone even without HDR adds a noticeable difference in contrast ratio. Meaning blacks look blacker even when right next to bright whites. HDR improves that, provided you have HDR content to enjoy.

An issue with some (much) older OLEDs was burn in, but at least in my experience, with more modern displays that seems to be much less of an issue. A lot of displays have a burn in reduction feature on board that seems to generally work well and the actual LEDs have gotten more durable as the tech has advanced.

I have an OLED display hooked up to an old rpi running my homeassistant control panel. It’s been displaying an essentially static image for nearly two years without any burn in.

Personally, I’d recommend an OLED monitor. If you can afford it, go for high resolution and high refresh rate. If you primarily watch video prioritize resolution, if you primarily game prioritize refresh rate. Though you may have issues going over 120Hz on Linux.

As for your DE, Mint should support KDE Plasma and you should be able install it like any other package. Might be worth looking up a guide for that. However, I won’t recommend against switching to Fedora. It’s what I use and I haven’t had any notable issues and their documentation seems pretty solid.

To me, if I had to get a new monitor, it would 100% have to be 120 Hz at 4K OLED with HDR.

My TV and smartphone are both HDR with high refresh rates and it really puts my laptop and desktop monitors to shame.

If i had the funds for an oled, it would probably be still worth it to me. I’m personally more concerned about burn-in

I use a AW34234DWF on plasma in HDR mode. I love it. It’s worth it. I do a lot of photo work with it. Mostly I don’t run games in HDR though, because it involves gamescope, which is more hassle than it’s worth for me

Yes. OLED has perfect blacks and if you’re a gamer because of pixel response times. OLED has pixel response time of 0.03 ms. Best LCD monitors have pixel response time of 1 ms. OLED image will be sharp through entire motion distance. Most games don’t support HDR but still benefit from above features.

I use an OLED HDR TV (LG C1) in Arch.

It is very worth it, even more so with Proton10 adding HDR support for gaming (without needing to use gamescope).

Obviously, if you’re going to buy a good HDR-capable display then you’re going to want HDR to work. A monitor doesn’t need HDR to look good, but HDR feels like a graphical upgrade that doesn’t cost you any frame rate.

If you’re comfortable enough with Mint, most of that knowledge will transfer over to other flavors of Linux.

I’d recommend something that allows you to use the most current software. Arch, for example. I know it has a reputation as being difficult to install but it is very much worth doing as it gives you a lot of hands-on work with the inner workings of Linux. It will take some time (I think it took me the whole day the first time) but the installation guide will walk you through it.

That being said For most people, I think an Arch install is an excellent project for a VM, or second piece of hardware. For your main PC, you just want it to be up and running as quick as possible so you can keep using it.

EndeavourOS is an Arch-based distro that uses a graphical installer and chooses a decent set of default packages for a desktop PC. That makes the installation of Arch much faster and you’re not left to research every little subsystem in order to figure out what packages you need.

I’m running HDR on Fedora 42 with Gnome. Unless you watch HDR video content or play HDR games I would say it’s not worth worrying about.

HDR is not for the type, but for tge resolution: Transitioning from one color to another over 3000 pixels will often result in very visible steps where each region of one color ends and the next begins. HDR can reduce these steps significantly. You need HDR less, if you have only 1080p, regarless if OLED, LCD or whatever. But if you have 4K and the display fills a lot of your field of view (meaning it’s big or you’re close) it can become super annoying without HDR. Of course, some people don’t mind either way. Maybe check it by visiting a store and getting close to the displays. Ask them to switch HDR off and on.

I’m not running an OLED but my monitor is HDR capable and I prefer the look, however I don’t run it in HDR mode. Reason being, it fucks with my OBS recordings and I have to up the quality significantly for them to be usable, which ups the storage requirements.

No. I wouldn’t even bother with a modern display unless it’s a 4K 120Hz HDR OLED at minimum.

That said, keep in mind that Linux’s support for HDR is limited at best, and I believe that only KDE supports it. That means no RTX HDR and no AutoHDR. So if a game or video doesn’t have native support for HDR, you can only play/watch it in SDR. Which is a damn shame, cause even SDR content looks amazing when converted, especially in the highlights.

If you don’t mind dual-booting, I’d recommend Windows 11 for SDR games, movies, and YouTube, until Linux gets its own conversation tools. You can also use Win10 (or LTSC), but then you’ll only get RTX HDR because 10 doesn’t support AutoHDR (which isn’t a huge deal because RTX HDR can replace AutoHDR in most games).

Any monitor is worth it without HDR.

IMO HDR makes things look worse most of the time, especially video games.