Why is Nvidia so dismissive towards Linux? Won't they make more money by being compatible with Linux? Me for example will never buy an Nvidia cards until it surpasses or at least matches AMD in driver support.
this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2023
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I mean, it seems like Nvidia barely even cares about gamers in general anymore, let alone linux users.
Weird, lots of AI people use Linux too...
AI people don’t need gaming drivers… I’m sure Nvidia happily supports machine learning drivers on linux. It makes them more money!
If they're pushing into enterprise servers, like for AI, those are almost guaranteed to be running on some form of linux. I guess companies are willing pay for support contracts so their use cases will probably work pretty well.
Companies don't care about Free Software. They're happy to exploit the community's free labor, but they have no interest in expending the slightest bit of effort or inconvenience to give back to it, even if their actions hurt themselves in the long run.
That's why they'd rather lock themselves into the proprietary ML ecosystem Nvidia is trying to build rather than support open-source drivers and standardized APIs like OpenCL.
They don't care about free software in the same way that many others in the FOSS community do. They don't believe all information should be free, or copyleft, but they will contribute significantly to an ecosystem if it results in software that is cheaper for them because they can spread the cost of maintenance and enhancement, and is not subject to exploitative contracts from vendor lock in.
A lot of the infrastructure I use at work is open source, some of it, like Chrome, is open source because the primary contributing company wants to use it to exert influence over the ecosystem, but other software, like PostGres, is maintained by a bunch of different for- and non-profit institutions because they hate oracle and want to make a cheaper to maintain relational database or sell services to companies using said cheaper relational database, but the latter is definitely kept in check by the former.
Businesses don't care about ideologies in general. They care about money.
They will use and contribute to FOSS whenever it fits their cost-benefit analysis.
That means, they usually don't mind FOSS for stuff that they don't sell, but that is used as infrastructure for their products.
For example, nobody makes money selling a kernel, but a kernel is a necessary base for many different products. If, for example, I build a car entertainment system, people buy a car entertainment system. Being able to use Linux as a base saves a huge amount of development cost. So a company might use Linux here and maybe even contribute some code. Because they benefit from cooperation on infrastructure that they don't directly make money off.
But of course they aren't in it for the ideology, so once using/contributing to FOSS would hurt their earnings, they will stop doing that.
It feels like we're saying the same thing at different levels of skepticism. Their primary motivation is going to be money as they're private companies. Most people will stop contributing to an open source project when it stops being important to them. Either its not profitable for them, or its no longer cutting edge, or they just don't like the direction of the project.
My main point is that private companies can and do contribute to the FOSS ecosystem and can do so in helpful, non-nefarious ways. Most aren't google, most just want a useful and reliable message queue or database or kernel without trying to profit directly from the component itself and instead just using the component to do the thing that actually makes them profitable.
Yeah, that's exactly what I meant.
In my company, for example, we are encouraged to contribute bugfixes/features that we need to FOSS projects that we use. E.g. we find a bug in Angular, we are encouraged to fix it and send it upstream.
But we are forbidden from making anything open source that we'd want to sell.
But you are also right that also private people have their limits when they contribute to a FOSS project, as evidenced by the many, many forks of FOSS software when the original project changes in a way the contributors didn't like (looking at you, OpenOffice. Or at any Debian-like OS)
Depending on the industry (thinking engineering and safety in particular) FOSS may actually cost more to implement and certify so that also has a bearing. But yeah, ultimately all about cost + revenue.
That is true, but on the other hand, industries like that usually don't use FOSS.
It's sort of like WiFi and 5G mobile drivers (especially the software driven radios), a lot of proprietary stuff is in the driver that reveals hardware secrets. GPU is also regulated now for export controls from USA-derived technology. With software-driven radios, you see a lot of effort to keep people from using bands outside their national laws.
Nvidia makes money no matter what because they have the fastest hardware on the market
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As far as I understand, they are pretty compatible with Linux, it's just open sourcing the drivers that they don't want to do.
I can promise they are VERY compatible with Linux, HPC systems use their GPUs, in a completely Linux environment. They are fantastic GPUs to use in a Linux environment performance wise.
But we want the sauce.
Definition of look-but-don't-touch open source.
Nvidia has always been a pain in the ass. At least we get source code now. That is why I switched to AMD/ATI years ago. I haven't kept up though if they are still good players or not.
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So, I'm getting the distinct impression that I should not attempt a switch to Linux while I have an NVIDIA graphics card. Is that an accurate assessment?
It works perfectly fine if you use the closed source drivers..it just needs a few extra steps.
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Not so, if you are OK using x11 you will probably have zero issues. Wayland support, however, is shit. I had a 1660 super when I switched and it was good. Just when I had two monitors with different refresh rates it get weird, x11 does not support it at all (there is some workarounds but they are workarounds). Wayland fix the issue but nvidia support for Wayland was veeery bad at the end of last year, when I switched to AMD.
The thing about being open source is just that the community could help move things faster and would not need to wait the good will of nvidia for everithing, but nvidia is still moving slow towards open source, it does not means that they aren't doing things and fixing bugs, just they are a bit slow and stubborn
I've been using the Wayfire window manager with an NVIDIA GPU and 2 monitors with different refresh rates and I don't encounter many issues. Rarely it'll still crash, but I've managed with this setup for around 6 months.
My next GPU will probably still be AMD though.
Sorry I should've stated that I'm using Kwin, afaik gnome is a little better too but I didn't know that Wayfire was a thing until now.
Similar experiance myself, but I've had multiple applications slow down, show major visual glitches or fail to run and when I make an issue on github or look it up in issues it's only happening on nvidia on wayland.
Still not as terrible as some say but not a great experiance
These glitches made me quit the nvidia+wayland combo, it was more prevalent in xWayland applications but it was bad, really bad, discord after some time was just chaotic stuff, it was frame 2 then frame 1, then frame 4, then frame 3, just bizarre.
What’s the issue with 2 refresh rates? I’ve got a 1440p 144hz monitor and a 1080p 60hz monitor and I haven’t noticed any issues with them. I can tell the 144hz one is actually running over 60hz as I can see the difference when the mouse moves over to the other screen
Afaik you can, I was using a KDE hack back in the day but it appeared to increase a lot of my perception of tearing in games and enable vsync were having no effect
There's always this deluge of posts of the absolute horror of nVidia in Linux.
Yes, nVidia is an evil capitalistic company. No they don't care much about Linux. Except when it suits them. Right now it's in the data center.
But then, AMD doesn't care that much either. Why would they, there aren't really any Linux users. They're both soulless corporation that would sell your children's kidney's without a second thought if they could make a dollar from it.
Now in practice, whatever you use, stuff mostly works 99.5 % of the time. There's no difference between nVidia and AMD (or intel), they all work fine.
Don't get drawn in stupid corporate dick sucking contests, it's completely pointless. Use what you want, or what you have, it doesn't matter.
The issue isn't whether the "company cares".
It's whether they end users fix your own problems, or force you into techno-feudalism where the only way to get a problem fixed is to hope the company cares enough to fix it for you.
The simplest example of Nvidia completely failing here is old hardware support. AMD cards doesn't have that problem because the drivers are open source and upstream. These new Nvidia drivers don't sound like they'll help - they're not maintainable and therefore not upstreamable.
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I can see how you would get that impression, but it is false. NVIDIA drivers are mostly fine today. They used to be abysmal, and still under the hood don’t work like everyone wants them to. The do, however, work. And for the most part they work well. Wayland can be a bit buggy, but I’ve been using kde Wayland for over a year now on an older nvidia system and I have experienced one bug that was a minor inconvenience.
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I’ve found that Linux tends to be a much better experience with an AMD GPU. The nvidia driver is mostly fine but would regularly cause my desktop to crash.
Mine keeps crashing with a 7900 XTX and AMD's drivers.
Sometimes I get greater crash and I get logged off, as if I pressed Crtl+Alt+Backspace
What kernel version are you on? Do you mean that you’re running AMD GPU pro?
My 6800xt crashes for any and every reason, even when not gaming. It happens quite a lot on arch compared to nobara.
Same here, I don't even have to be playing.
I have an rtx card and the only issues I've experience is a resume from suspend/hibernate bug where it locks up. I just disable sleep/hibernate, let my monitor turn off still, and shut down my PC whenever I'm done.
EDIT: I also have had the best luck with arch but I'm picky about pre installed software.
I used an nvidia gaming laptop on different distros for more than 5 years without any issues. The nvidia driver works great. The only thing lagging is the noveau open source driver like mesa for amd.
It works most of the time, but since NVIDIA is the only one fixing your drivers, chances are your bugs won't be fixed.
Not true at all anymore. Distros like NobaraOS set things up by default (and increases gaming performance by ~4% over fedora according to Linux Experiment) so you don't really have to worry
It's just not as convenient as AMD for power users
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I started using linux when I had an nvidia gpu, it worked alright enough. Not many drivers issues, most of my issues were age related for the gpu itself. I did swap to all AMD hardware for my new computer. The swap to AMD is nice. I did upgrade everything from my previous stuff, so no matter what I expected an increase of performance. I do notice that my resource usage is lower and general speed for mundane tasks is better.
Nvidia drivers have some kind of stupid locking issue when it comes to creating windows, when my phone spams me notifications to pushbullet or kdeconnect it locks up half my system.
AMD has none of that, windows pop up like nothing, kind of impressed because I'd been team green since literally forever (back when fglrx was a crashy pos).
It's only been a few weeks, but yeah I noticed that I don't have to fight my windows as often. Games don't have issues with odd window layouts either.
Nvidia used to be the gold standard for Linux graphics, they've slowly slid and Intel had good drivers even if the hw was weak, but amd is really making a solid showing right now, especially considering their legacy of decent hardware with garbage software.
I wonder how much of that is down to the Steam Deck and its AMD hardware?
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Nothing to see here
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