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.

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).

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 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.

One thing I might consider is whether you want a tandem OLED monitor. They're out now, but not widespread, and that monitor is not one, and it's one area where OLED monitors are improving significantly. My guess

not following closely

is that they will be more-widespread before long.

The main drawback of OLED monitors on desktops today from my standpoint is that there is some burn-in potential, and the longer one plans to keep the monitor

and you've kept your last for some time

the more potential. Running the LEDs at a lower brightness level reduces the impact.

Tandem OLED monitors use multiple LED layers, which combine their brightness. The rationale is more that it lets one have brighter output

OLED displays aren't presently as bright as LCD displays, and more brightness is nice, especially for TVs. However, it also means that each layer can be driven at less power, helping mitigate burn-in. They're also somewhat more power-efficient, since efficiency falls off at brighter levels.

For me, brightness isn't a big deal on desktops, since I'm not needing to use them outdoors, and they don't need to outshine the sun. And I don't much care about power efficiency on a desktop monitor. But putting off burn-in would be nice.

I haven't seen burn-in on my OLED phone after years of use, but I also don't use my phone as much as a computer can be, and I understand that the longer daily use of computers is expected to be a more-significant factor.

It is possible to get visible burn-in on existing OLED monitors after a lot less than a decade of use:

https://hothardware.com/news/qd-oled-burn-in-testing-one-year-results

There are currently tandem OLED monitors out with five layers.

On a phone, I myself wouldn't worry about it, but I also tend to keep desktop monitors for a lot longer than phones.

OLED is worth it if you got the coin mate

HDR implementation in monitors is no proper so it shouldn't impact your decision IMHO

If you care for HDR, I would wait until next gen where they helpfully get it implemented properly..

I recently upgraded to a 4k monitor with HDR and shortly after that GNOME 48 came out with HDR and VRR support, so KDE Plasma and GNOME are the two desktops I know of that support HDR. I use GNOME and it works really well even though I do need to use gamescope if I want to play a Windows game with HDR and Firefox doesn't (yet?) support it on Linux. It definitely looks really cool but it's not a huge loss if you stick with Mint and just use SDR. It seems like you wanna get the monitor either way, so I'm pretty sure you can just use a live USB of something like Fedora to try HDR out without having to actually install anything. I'm just not sure what software you could try it out in because (at least to my knowledge) no browser supports HDR on Linux yet and you can't just install a whole game on a USB stick.

Any monitor is worth it without HDR.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Totally worth it even in SDR, the pure blacks are so much better than any other form of backlighting, and even without HDR the colors are much more vibrant.