I still don't really understand the context around the Apple fight and it's a huge bummer, since Apple hardware with Nvidia GPUs would be the best combination.
When I used Linux the closed source Nvidia drivers were better than anything else and easily available, the complaints around them seemed mostly to be ideological?
The price complaints seemed mostly about 'value' since the performance was still better than the competition in absolute terms.
Nvidia had some GPUs that ran hot and had a above average failure rate so apple were unhappy because it made a couple of models of macs look bad. They also had enough revenue of their own that they didn't care enough to invent some SKUs so people couldn't compare macs to PC laptops.
The big issue with Nvidia GPUs in Linux these days is with Wayland. There are some graphics APIs that are the current way to create contexts, manage GPU resources etc but Nvidia went their own way which would require compositors to have driver specific code.
Many smaller compositors (such as the most popular tiling one for Wayland) don't want to write or support one implementation for Intel/AMD and one for Nvidia so they either don't support Nvidia or require snarky sounding cli options to enable Nvidia at the cost of support.
Interesting - makes sense, thanks for the context.
I'd suspect part of the reason Nvidia went their own way is because their way is better? Is that the case - or is it more about just keeping things proprietary? Probably both?
If I had to guess, some mixture of ability to improve things faster with tighter integration at the expense of an open standard (pretty much what has generally happened across the industry in most domains).
Though this often leads to faster iteration and better products (at least in the short term, probably not long term).
"When people complain to me about the lack of Nvidia support in Sway, I get really pissed off. It is not my fucking problem to support Nvidia, it’s Nvidia’s fucking problem to support me."
I'd suggest his users asking for Nvidia support are evidence of this being wrong.
That aside though, it seems like Nvidia's proprietary driver doesn't have support for some kernal APIs and the other vendors (AMD, Intel) do?
I wonder why I've always had better experience with basic OS usage using the Nvidia proprietary driver over AMD in Linux. Maybe I just didn't use any applications relying on these APIs. Nouveau has never been good though.
Not really a surprise given the tone of that blog post that Nvidia doesn't want to collaborate with OSS community.
Don't people rely on Nvidia for deep learning workflows? I thought that stuff ran on Linux? Maybe this is just about different dev priorities for what the driver supports?
> Don't people rely on Nvidia for deep learning workflows? I thought that stuff ran on Linux?
It all comes down to there always being two ways to do things when interacting with a GPU under Linux: The FOSS/vendor-neutral way, and the Nvidia way.
The machine learning crowd has largely gone the Nvidia way. Good luck getting your CUDA codebase working on any other GPU.
The desktop Linux crowd has largely gone the FOSS route. They have software that works well with AMD, Intel, VIA, and other manufacturers. Nvidia is the only one that wants vendor-specific code.
While AMD has been great at open source and contributing to the kernel, they also (from what I can remember) have been subpar with their reliability (both in proprietary and open source).
NVIDIA has been more or less good with desktop Linux + Xorg for the last 5-7 years (not accounting for the non support for hybrid graphics on Linux laptops).
I think you can use an NVIDIA GPU as a pure accelerator without it driving a display very easily.
Well - they charged more at each price point because they were faster.
At some prices I think it wasn't enough to justify the extra cost from a price to performance ratio, but that doesn't seem like a reason to think they're bad.
It's possible I'm a little out of date on this, I only keep up to date on the hardware when it's relevant for me to do a new build.
If vendor A's cards are $180, $280 and $380 and vendor B's cards are $150, $250 and $350, it's common practice to group them into three price points of $150-199, $250-299 and $350-399 so that each card gets compared to its nearest in price.
The prices are way closer together than that, because both companies sell way more than 3 cards. There are three variants of 2080 priced differently and two of the 2070 and 2060 each. That's seven price points above 300$ alone without looking at the lower segment (2 of those cards are EOL but still available a bit cheaper at some vendors). nVidia and AMD have always had enough cards that are at the same MSRP.
When I used Linux the closed source Nvidia drivers were better than anything else and easily available, the complaints around them seemed mostly to be ideological?
The price complaints seemed mostly about 'value' since the performance was still better than the competition in absolute terms.