skullgiver, 1 year ago

But as a general rule, if you have Nvidia, then you are not allowed to complain about anything… that was your choice, and with Nvidia under Linux, all bets are off. I thought that was clear a long time a go, especially after Linus not so subtle outburst.

See, this attitude is exactly why Linux will never become mainstream. On Windows you don’t need to research if your machine will be able to run your operating system of choice, it just works.

If you’re a user, and you can install Linux without seeing a single warning that your hardware is going to cause issues, your distro is at fault. The moment you boot the installer, it knows damn well that your using Nvidia hardware and what the implications are. Distros either ignore the predictable instability, or they believe there is no problem, and either way the end user isn’t to blame for taking that at face value.

The truth is, Linux on Nvidia works fine, except for some very specific laptops with stupid mux chips, and even that is something Linux should fix, not the end user. Luckily, Linux installers don’t even boot on those machines, so the end user can just ignore Linux and continue using Windows.

You just can’t use Wayland if you want your Linux system to be stable, but X11 works fine and it will continue to do so for many years. Part of the Wayland issues still come from intermediate code refusing to work around Nvidia’s bullshit, ignoring known bugs and technically-spec-compliant-but-different stuff because it’s easier to blame Nvidia for everything. Wayland also makes some weird assumptions that I disagree with (“if the Wayland socket dies, your application must crash, there is no recovery”) which make minor stability problems a lot worse in practice.

Nvidia may be to blame for their shitty drivers when it comes to the core problem of the bad experiences Nvidia owners will have, not the end users buying the wrong hardware. You can’t seriously expect people who try it out for the first time to read up on the drama and controversy Linus Torvalds has caused over the years.

And even with all that, many serious Linux users who know full well the pain they’re about to subject themselves to still need Nvidia. ROCm is great but it’s nowhere near to as efficient and well-supported as CUDA. Whatever Intel has doesn’t come close and whatever macOS offers doesn’t work because even Nvidia has perfect Linux support compared to Apple.