[YOUTUBE]IVpOyKCNZYw[/YOUTUBE] I thought I'd just post this for the free software community folks on here.
Linus knows what's up! I refuse to patronize nVidia (given the choice) precisely because of their difficulty to work with.
I've enjoyed my nVidia products in the past, and they are good about providing drivers for Linux users. The problem is that they are proprietary binaries that you get, and nouveau isn't terribly good at the moment. I've renewed my commitment to free software, and I'm trying to see how far I can take my system on it. Do we know if ATI is any better to deal with on drivers?
I love how Linus doesn't mind saying it like it is. I wonder if a public rebuke from the guy that is literally the father of Linux will make any dent in Nvidia's lack of interest in supporting the platform?
I really hope so, because I feel that Direct3D really needs to be unseated. OpenGL has always been a better API, in my opinion (and John Carmack's as it turns out, until recently).
1st: Fuck yeah Linus! Please keep being you as long as you can manage. You know they are such an easy target, and it's really unfair what with all the politics and drama after Xfree86's self destruction, but I blame Xorg. The newest mesa drivers still mean that I as a programmer have to continue using ancient shaders and a really dated API if I write games for Linux... unless I just assume (correctly, unfortunately) that everyone's using nVidia. The sooner Xorg pulls out some decent drivers that work on generic intel POS on-board graphic chips, the ones that come with your computer OOTB, then the sooner we can finally say goodbye to nVidia for good. Well laziness and the fact that Xorg inherited a clusterfuck. But hopefully valid reason b will give way to excuse a soon. Looks like. Gentoo Linux Documentation -- Gentoo Linux ATI FAQ I find in general my best bet usually if I want to see if drivers work in linux is the gentoo and arch communities even though I use slack. Just about any computer you can buy in a big box store, they've gotten everything singing in Linux. To the point where you can google your computer and add the word "gentoo" and you're golden, right down to walking you through the menuconfig.
I'm not the guy to be tweaking every possible optimization that I can out of my system (at least not at home, I do that for $DAYJOB and it's quite exhausting), so Gentoo is pretty much out for me. As for ATI support in "mainstream" distros, I've found it to be fairly good. As Pret Alez mentioned, noveuau is pretty much a piece of garbage, but the OSS Radeon drivers are actually pretty good
Now Mr. Torvalds tell us how you really feel. Does anyone else follow him on Google+, his posts can be pretty interesting. At $OLDJOB I had a Lenovo ThinkPad W530, which had switchable Intel/nVidia graphics. Normally I would just force it to Intel only, but multi-monitor support required the nVidia graphics. OMG did the drivers suck. I had this wonderful issue, where if my cursor was over my a VM Fusion window and the screen saver would come on, I could not unlock my terminal. Then when I would pull it out of the dock half the time X would crash. I honestly don't get why nVidia insists on being such a pain in the ass.
I watched that whole presentation last year. Yeah he is a pretty funny guy, and I like how he just tells it like it is. Anyway, I agree with Linus Torvalds that nVidia is just a royal pain in the arse. The only reason I am using nVidia graphics cards at the moment is that they support FreeBSD and their legacy hardware support seems reasonable too. But as soon as FreeBSD KMS support for Radeon HD cards becomes reasonable (not like the half baked KMS support for Intel GPUs it has now), I will switch. I also agree with Pret Allez, nouveau sucks really really bad. I was using it for a couple of kernel releases it was tolerable in 3.6.y but it went to shit in 3.7.y so I switched back to the propriety drivers. I don't know much about graphics APIs, but all I know is I support whichever one is an open standard. Yeah I occasional go over some of his postings on Google+ plus Greg KHs' and a few others too. I mainly follow the LKML, now that's where some interesting and heated discussions go on.
Now, I just want to make it clear that I'm not throwing the nouveau developers under the bus. The reason that nouveau sucks is exactly why Torvalds is giving nVidia the finger: they just won't tell the community what the internals are. The nouveau developers basically have to reverse engineer the product, which is extremely antisocial on nVidia's part. I'm convinced that GPL-licensed ATI drivers would be just as bad if AMD were just as difficult as nVidia to work with. So it's pretty unfortunate. A lot of us want to use GNU/Linux not just for a change of pace, and not just for cost savings, but because we genuinely want software that respects our freedom. And sometimes the hardware manufacturers do stuff like this and basically stonewall the community, which is not fair. And one of these days, I do hope we can get nVidia to play by the rules or feel the pressure of shifting market share to AMD/ATI. While it might seem tangential, I'd like to point out that part of what will help the shift is more games being developed that are more heavily threaded, because right now, people like Intel processors so much more because they are better performance per core. (At least, that was true at the time I was comparing Sandy Bridge to the Bulldozer architecture.) However, I think AMD truly eight-core (as opposed to quad-core hyperthreaded CPUS) will get the edge the more people do parallel programming like they should. As we start to see that shift, I think that will help AMD/ATI against nVidia. While I have enjoyed my nVidia products, I definitely don't think I'll be buying from them again.
This. I hope I didn't come off as bad mouthing the nouveau developers, because they are doing the best job they can do under the circumstances. I like using Linux not only for the freedom associated with it, but because shit actually works and there is a great deal of power at your finger tips.
So NVidia doesn't support Linux. Instead, it makes really good cards for use with Windows and OSX, which are its main audience. I'd call that a smart business plan. It's not about playing in the same field, it's about making money. AMD isn't any difference - their position in the market simply forces them to pick up the sloppy seconds.
Look, we're not talking about nVidia telling developers how to write drivers. All we're talking about is having them merely release documentation about how their hardware works.
Well it would be a smarter business plan if they supported open-source development, so they can target people who like FLOSS and markets where Linux is a must like servers, supercomputers and clusters for further potential bussiness. The only reason why AMD/ATI is lagging behind nVidia is because they can't write good drivers.
Also, I feel like it's worth pointing out that nVidia does support Linux. For a certain definition of support. Even from version 9.04 (which is over three years ago), I could download Ubuntu, install it, and out of the box, it would say "hey, I see you have an nVidia card; would you like me to install the proprietary drivers? They are not open source, so we can't support them." I've always been able to run my nVidia hardware very well on GNU/Linux systems of various flavors. nVidia has always provided binaries, even bleeding edge drivers for developers on the GNU/Linux platform. The problem is that we don't want proprietary binaries. We want to write our own source code so that we can run the hardware we bought and therefore own. We want it to be peer reviewed by the GNU/Linux community so that we can be sure it's the most performance-optimal for our applications and that it provides no other person with any means whatsoever to restrict our use of it. Keep in mind this is bigger than just nVidia. Other companies have played nicer. I mean, there are even free X.Org drivers for Intel. If they can chip in, certainly nVidia can.
This. Another benefit of having open-source drivers is that benefits other projects like FreeBSD as example has ported over Intel KMS support from Linux and is the process of doing so for AMD/ATI. That would not of been possible if it weren't for open-source drivers and documentation.
