“NVidia has a history of not playing nice with Linux.”
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NVidia has a history of not playing nice with Linux. Allow me to point to a small comment Linus Torvalds made on Nvidia a while ago (NSFW): this video
Linus Torvalds - Nvidia F_ck You!
950K views · Jun 17, 2012 · 1:58 · 0 HN recommenders · 9 mentions · discussed 2013–2022
A two-minute clip of Linus Torvalds at an Aalto University talk telling Nvidia "F_ck you" over its poor Linux support. It is an excerpt of a longer talk.
Why Hacker News points people here: HN cites it as shorthand for the long-running frustration of the Linux community with Nvidia's drivers, often as a joke or background.
“See things like this infamous clip from Torvalds[0] for more context on the community sentiment around nvidia in general.”HN comment, 2022
What Hacker News said 9
“Some background.”
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Some background. this video Shouldn't be a problem anymore under Linux as most distros today install Nouveau drivers by default. link
“Linus gave a VERY public, VERY brutal rant on NVIDIA and their drivers four years ago.[0]”
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You're asking a question with a very complex answer. I'll start with a short answer - AMD wants to have at minimum a reasonably good baseline functionality on linux, out of the box. If that answer doesn't make much sense, please read on for the complex bits. To provide some historical context, Linus gave a VERY public, VERY brutal rant on NVIDIA and their drivers four years ago.[0] At the time, NVIDIA's closed drivers were an opaque blob which basically reimplemented the entirety of OpenGL. These collided with everything else. The open drivers (nouveau) were slow and far behind in features. The situation was bad enough that you couldn't necessarily even install a linux distro on a system with NVIDIA chip because the open drivers wouldn't work well enough for X and/or desktop environment to initialise properly, let alone remain up and functional. In effect, if you wanted to run linux, you were best off without NVIDIA. Fast forward year and a half. NVIDIA had come out and committed to improving the linux driver situation. They still couldn't open source their current-generation drivers, but they had realised the horrible reputation of their hardware on linux was going to be a persistent PR nightmare, and thus an existential threat to their growing mobile division. A space where they were up against Imagination Technologies. (Don't get me started on ImgTec, please...) NVIDIA needed to get their hardware and software processes aligned in a way that they would work reliably out of
“For quite some time it was graphics drivers support”
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What's really stopping us here? For quite some time it was graphics drivers support: this video Is this still the case? I hear from many people that at least on Ubuntu that's no problem anymore. Are the graphics cards still overheating? Any experience in that area? And yes, Valve could've done things better, but it's not that bad, that you couldn't do anything with at. As said, at least on Ubuntu with Steam gaming should be fine. And if we got one thing from Steam it's that more and more games are deployed for Linux as well. Really, why hasn't it lifted off now? Is it really that users are so stupid that they don't see a $0 offer is better than a $100 offer for an OS? Hard to believe.
“Nvidia has been the single worst company we have ever delt with so Nvidia F_ck You!" -- Linus Torvalds”
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You are not wrong "Nvidia has been the single worst company we have ever delt with so Nvidia F_ck You!" -- Linus Torvalds [1] [1] this video
“See things like this infamous clip from Torvalds[0] for more context on the community sentiment around nvidia in general.”
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This is a good technical summary of the impact but I think misses the somewhat emotive history here. See things like this infamous clip from Torvalds[0] for more context on the community sentiment around nvidia in general. [0] this video
“All I can think of is when Linus said told Nvidia "F... you!" and flipped the bird.”
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All I can think of is when Linus said told Nvidia "F... you!" and flipped the bird. this video This isn't just an isolated incident either, but I'm no shining example of acting professionally.
“FWIW there's Linus' famous Nvidia F-bomb :)”
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YMMV I suppose. Some people seem to have good experiences with their driver but mine have been terrible. I've used Ubuntu as my daily driver for 7 years now and Nvidia's driver has been the #1 source of crashes and configuration problems (half of the time I can't even get 3d accel working with it turned on, spend hours trying different versions that are reported on some forum to have fixed some problem but they don't, can't figure out why things aren't working, upon upgrading from 16.04 to 18.04 it borked the whole system and I had to switch to Nouveau, this list of Nvidia driver pain goes on forever, this is across multiple installs of Ubuntu). All my experience has been on laptops and there are lots of reports of Optimus related problems on Linux so there's that. I gave up on the hope of having Optimus actually work years ago. I would like to just be able to enable the latest version of Nvidia's driver and see my laptop start using the discrete gpu. That would be a big step forward from the past 7 years. FWIW there's Linus' famous Nvidia F-bomb :) "Nvidia has been the single worst company we ever dealt with" this video
“That's the reason there's an infamous photo of Linus showing the finger to nVidia”
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Yeah, if you even need dedicated GPUs at all, as usually it's Gamers who are looking for those and they're usually on Windows systems anyways (really looking forward to installing Windows 7 on the laptop I mentioned if I do get it this year - kinda mean that both ironic and not-ironic...). The built-in Radeon Vega 8 or 10 solutions on all mobile Ryzens are usually better and more efficient than current Intel counterparts, so if you don't need a dGPU, then that's one more reason to root for Team Green. EDIT: In case anyone reading isn't aware, nVidia is a biaaatch when it comes to drivers for Linux. Anyone looking for powerful GPUs in Linux machines, no matter desktop or laptop, has an easier life with AMD solutions. That's the reason there's an infamous photo of Linus showing the finger to nVidia: this video