Old but gold. posting for anybody who hasn’t seen this yet.
I’m particularly amused by the pro-NVIDIA “it just works” comments. Compared to what exactly? With AMD, the 3D acceleration driver is bundled directly into VESA, so it’s already ready & working before even the first-boot of almost all desktop distros. That’s how drivers are supposed to work on Linux and it has taken NVIDIA 10+ years (and counting…) to get with the basic program.
I applaud the long overdue decision to move their proprietary firmware directly onto the card and making the rest of the kernel driver open-source, but I’ll remind you folks of a few things:
- The open source driver is still in an alpha with no timeline for a stable release
- NVIDIA has so far elected to control their own driver releases instead of incorporating 3D acceleration support into VESA
NVIDIA had to be dragged screaming to go this far and they’re still not up to scratch. There’s still plenty of fuel left in the “Fuck NVIDIA” gastank.
I’m particularly amused by the pro-NVIDIA “it just works” comments. Compared to what exactly?
Compared to nothing. I have used Nvidia graphics cards under Linux for many years. The last one was a GTX 1070. In order for the cards to work, I had to install the driver once with the command
pacman -S nvidia-dkms. So the effort was very small.By the way, I am currently using a 6800 XT from AMD. I therefore don’t want to defend Nvidia graphics cards across the board.
Unfortunately, when it comes to Nvidia, many people do not judge objectively. Torvalds’ “fuck you”, for example, referred to what he saw as Nvidia’s lack of cooperation with the kernel developers. And i think he was right. But it was never about how good or bad the graphics cards were usable under Linux. Which, unfortunately, many Linux users claim. Be it out of lack of knowledge or on purpose.
Since then, some things have changed and Nvidia has contributed code to several projects like Plasma or Mesa to improve the situation regarding Wayland.
Compared to nothing. I have used Nvidia graphics cards under Linux for many years. The last one was a GTX 1070. In order for the cards to work, I had to install the driver once with the command pacman -S nvidia-dkms. So the effort was very small.
Kernel modules work until they don’t. I’m genuinely glad that you’ve have a good experience and – despite appearances – I’m not interested in provoking a vendor flamewar… but the fact remains that among the three major patterns (builtin, userland, module), modules are the most fragile and least flexible. I’ll cite this response to my parent comment as an example.
Unfortunately, when it comes to Nvidia, many people do not judge objectively. Torvalds’ “fuck you”, for example, referred to what he saw as Nvidia’s lack of cooperation with the kernel developers. And i think he was right. But it was never about how good or bad the graphics cards were usable under Linux. Which, unfortunately, many Linux users claim. Be it out of lack of knowledge or on purpose.
That’s a fair point, but to a certain extent I think this overlooks the importance of developer sentiment on a project like Linux. Take (Intel) Macbooks as an extreme example: kernel developers liked the hardware enough to support it despite utter vendor indifference. It’s clearly a case of hypocrisy compared to NVIDIA who (at the very least) participates, but at the end of the day people will show love for the things that they love. NVIDIA remains unloved and I do feel that this bleeds through to the user experience a fair amount.
In any case, you’re right to say that legitimate criticisms are often blown out of proportion. Developer problems aren’t necessarily user problems, even if we sometimes romanticize otherwise.
I recall this from around the time I basically gave up dealing with Linux and Nvidia chips. At that time, I felt I couldn’t agree more. Has this improved in recent years at all? With Nvidia getting more into data centers as their focus, I figure Linux has to be a focus, no?
Things have improved a lot in the 11 years since Linus made that statement. For the most part Nvidia drivers just work. They have even released some opensource drivers fairly recently that will go a long way to making things even better, especially for the existing OSS drivers.
But they are still not perfect. They do keep doing their own thing for years before finally giving up and doing what everyone else is. The latest of which was the EGL Streams API nvidia created for wayland where everyone else was using GBM APIs which forced many window managers and applications to have to explicitly support nvidia drivers. But they have now switched to GBM like everything else (though last I heard their implementations were far from bug-free, things have likely improved since then those as that was over a year ago now).
Nvidia cards are mostly working fine these days as long as you’re not using Wayland. If you’re using Wayland, be prepared to encounter lots of minor annoyances, and perhaps some bugs that completely break your workflow depending what you’re using Linux for (e g. on server you don’t have to deal with sleep issues, but in desktop it’s an annoyance while on laptop it might be a deal breaker).
This is just a circlejerk now.