I did it from scratch following a guide from Linux Magazine from a few months ago. I had to do some modifying and it was a lot of work, but it runs pretty seamlessly now, so the effort was worth it. I’ll see if I can find it and tell you which month’s issue it was in.

Dumb question, but are you using a monitor that supports HDR? And is set to display in HDR?

I’m not sure how KDE handles HDR but if you’re looking at the SDR and HDR side by side, one of them is either displaying incorrectly or being converted on the fly to display in the other dynamic range.

That’s not what HDR10 means at all, it’s just a different data encoding standard. Like Blu rays vs HDDVDs. A properly encoded HDR10 looks just as bright/dark in a proper monitor

Can you describe how you are enabling it? In-game? Are you adjusting it in game after enabling it? Is your deck itself set to full brightness (you obviously won’t get the full 1000 nits if not)

I use lightsail exactly for that purpose. I’ve had my firewall using wireguard connected to lightsail for over 2 years now. Will rarely run into a block or glitched captcha loop but it does happen. I also pay for express VPN as a backup and have that on my phone, and surprisingly that is virtually never blocked. Performance with wireguard / lightsail is more consistent for all day use though

Just to add to the Asahi Linux chorus - I’m self hosting a bunch of things, not on VMs but installed on the actual OS, and it’s been incredibly fast and reliable. I do have thorough offsite backups happening because one should, but loving it so far.