Linus Torvalds Calls NVIDIA The Worst Company Ever

[johnc]

Those pathetic losers have comments closed. They probably could guess that their lie would otherwise could be challenged. User experience? Ha-ha, when you install Linux and it's built-in opensource driver is half-working, this is very awkward experience. And downloading some blob from hell knows where and why is so Windws way of doing the things... something that Nvidia fails to understand all the time.

Just to clarify:

That forum is not operated, owned or in any way financially supported by NVIDIA. Developers do visit the forum to take bug reports and post driver release announcements.

When this topic was raised, the administrator / owner asked that it not be discussed on his forum. After which the forum suffered a significant amount of downtime. After being restored he posted the PR from NVIDIA and I haven't seen the topic been mentioned since.

[0xBADCODE]

Maybe you should use more user friendly distribution then? Ubuntu provides easy installer for propietary drivers and distributions like Chakra install with them by default.

In fact I use user-friendly Ubuntu most of time for desktop, but:
1) I like when hardware works out of the box. Have you ever heard Plug-n-play word? Nvidia surely got it Windows way.
2) And no, thank you, if I'll want smth full of blobs "by default", there is already Windows. No need for yet another cheap imitation.
3) Distro maintainers are very limited in options when it comes to bugfixing and adaptation. And it's very noticeable in term of long standing bugs.
4) Proprietary blob is inherently foreign stuff in opensource system. This implies bugs. From my experience, many unsuccessful OS upgrades to new Ubuntu version were due to to proprietary drivers.
5) I trust to maintainers and opensource sw authors far more than I trust to some suspicious company and their uber-secret blobs.
6) I don't see what's wrong if Aveage Joe (or me, you, whoever) would want to create own flavour of distro. However proprietary things not like free software. Free software welcomes this. Proprietary prohibits this. As for me, it's wrong to cripple this degree of freedom and smells like unfair competition.
7) Even more, this puts less popular OSes at competetive disadvantage. I don't see why it should be forbidden to Haiku, NetBSD or whoever to try create fully-functional driver using kernel interface convenient for them. Who loses? Customers. They miss extra chance for new fresh competetive upstarts. It's wrong.
8) On it's own, PCI-E is a platform-neutral bus. There is nothing wrong to have it on ARM, MIPS, PPC or whatever else. There is nothing wrong in putting any PCI-E device on any device with PCI-E bus. Artificially limiting it to x86 only is wrong way of doing things. It backstabs new developments once more. So less innovations, less competition. Let it stuck and rot. Who loses? Customers again.
9) You see, if all people would become worthless consumers, we'll face huge troubles. As a civilization. So someone have to develop things further. Raising barriers on this way is wrong. That's why "I have all things working!" counts for you but does not counts for rest of world. If there will be no developers, things will get stuck.
10) Nvidia don't respects other devs, forcing them to waste their time on reverse engineering. So why devs should show any respect? It's just a proper thing to show them finger for such hostility to developers.

[0xBADCODE]

When this topic was raised, the administrator / owner asked that it not be discussed on his forum.

So now there is also censorship to shut up those unhappy with nvidia policy and hence interferring with their fat profits . That's what I would expect from proprietary companies and their fans. They always have to resort to tyranny and screw up someone, one way or another. And that's one of reasons why I dislike propritary approach.

[Teho]

So now there is also censorship to shut up those unhappy with nvidia policy and hence interferring with their fat profits . That's what I would expect from proprietary companies and their fans. They always have to resort to tyranny and screw up someone, one way or another. And that's one of reasons why I dislike propritary approach.

It's a support forum not a place for religious wars. I kinda see why they want to keep the trolls away.

[Artemis3]

Linus was spot on: Preinstalled.

Looks like a Steve Ballmer moment to be honest. Slightly embarrassing, to say the least.

Earlier in the talk somebody asked him why Linux had never taken off on the desktop. He completely misses the answer of course. The "open-source-only" religious fanatics had dominated the Linux community for 15+ years and pretty much relegated it to nothing more than a cheap alternative to other UNIX-like OSes (i.e., for the server / workstation markets). Even Google had to go heavy on non-GPL licenses to make Android successful.

Of course, without NVIDIA's current efforts, Linux as a mainstream desktop is an absolute non-starter.

Bullshit. Linus was spot on: Preinstalled.

IMO every computer should be sold with a free OS preinstalled by default, and any commercial alternative (ie Windows) be optional by adding the license fee (microsoft tax); not the other way around.

What had fanatics to do with anything? The GPL only affects you if you want to do modifications and then publicly redistribute said modifications without disclosing them. There is also lgpl and freebsd style licenses. Many corporations have no problem working with these, and there was a time were every hardware component had their whole technical manual available without stupid clauses, that is exactly what we need. The likes of nvidia are thankfully a minority.

While Android is like 20% free 80% proprietary, Ubuntu is more like 90% free, while MacOSX is the opposite with like 10% free. If "fanatics" were such a nuisance, why bother with free components at all? Where is Copland OS? Free software is used by merits of quality and reliability vs the closed model.

There is also people like Shuttleworth working to bring linux to the masses, not only focusing in a user oriented distro, but also dealing to have the OS come preinstalled in computers, or stand alone devices like TVs or even cellphones.

The advantage of working open is a benefit, not a hindrance; but it takes time and effort to convince some corporate managerial types who are more used to secrecy and isolation (leading to bugs, security holes, etc). There is a whole school of tough about compete vs cooperate, which causes a never ending "re-invent the wheel" situation because the other guy won't or can't share. Humanity wouldn't have progressed without people copying and/or building upon the works of others.

Nvidia needed for a mainstream desktop?... Maybe only if you are a gamer, anything else can already be done with other brands or even nouveau. This might be because the community has been slow with AMD/ATI, or some issues with few undocumented features there. Intel has traditionally fared better in that camp (with few exceptions), there also used to be others, the most promising bough by nvidia and sold for parts (3dfx).

Perhaps someday the Chinese will come with a clone gpu architecture to rid us of this mess or at least open another path, same way they did their mipsel (loongsoon) cpu, they might take something, add a few changes, document it and mass produce it to break nvidia's position once for all.

[e8hffff]

It's even simpler than that. Linux is coming everywhere whether you like it or not, and the companies that don't adapt to the new business model are going to lose out even with the old capitalistic system. It's simple: when Dell or System76 or whoever has to choose what hardware to ship on their OEM Linux boxes (which are coming eventually), they're going to choose the hardware with the best graphics drivers. If you don't have KMS or Wayland or Optimus or current-enough drivers to run on recent kernels or proper mode-switching support, you are going to get passed up. The same applies to Android, but replace KMS/Wayland/Optimus with whatever the latest craze is on ARM SoC graphics. Power saving? Open source drivers so that manufacturers can fix bugs themselves? Support for the latest OpenGL ES? Clearly there are more factors in selecting a well-working chip with a well-working driver than sheer performance.

Nvidia doesn't need Linus Torvalds to tell them fuck you. They are fucking themselves just plenty on their own. Linus was just trying to wake them up so that maybe in the coming revolution they might survive, but if they don't, nobody -- absolutely nobody -- is going to miss them.

It's clear now Microsoft is finished. They can't get it right in the mobile market which is the future. The Surface Tablet has had a poor reception when announced. Metro is enforced on Users who don't want it nor on a phone or tablet. Windows RM8 breaks their linage and divides their support and software products. Linux on the other hand is scalable and is suited for the biggest of computing to the smallest, low powered device.

Who will command server farms, ARM. Who will command mobiles tablets, ARM. Who will command ARM, LINUX. There's the answer to the future.

The famous people in computer, tomorrow, will be Linux figures.

(If hardware vendors don't get on-board now, and with A1 drivers and products will be cutting their own prosperity.)

[0xBADCODE]

It's clear now Microsoft is finished. They can't get it right in the mobile market which is the future. The Surface Tablet has had a poor reception when announced.

They missed virtualisation markets. And their virtualisaton products is whay I call real crap. They missed netbooks and forced everyone to eat Vista which has been just too slow to be usable on netbooks. They failed to compete iPOD and then iphone and ipad. Then Android has appeared and finally overtook OEM market offering better terms and conditions. Free of charge? Customisable? Flexible? Multi-tasking? Not limited to very few chipsets? Ha-ha. WP7 stands no chance.

MS lost it ability to create good products. They only able to "produce" some racket and dirty tricks. Not something that works well for technology companies.

[0xBADCODE]

It's a support forum not a place for religious wars. I kinda see why they want to keep the trolls away.

There is absolutely no excuse for censorship (*)

* Unless you're Mr. Stalin.

P.s.: I'm really happy I don't have to deal with such vendor and such community.

[Paul Frederick]

I always recommend Nvidia

Point taken: don't buy NVidia hardware from now on; don't recommend their hardware also for our friend..
But..but.. If I use linux, their driver is one of the best.. 怎么办？
Oh, what an irony..

Because Nvidia works the best for me. I wish I could say FOSS is better, but so far it hasn't been.

[scjet]

It's about time.

Phoronix: Linus Torvalds Calls NVIDIA The Worst Company Ever

Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux kernel, has called out NVIDIA for their poor graphics drivers in a public presentation. In the talk he called NVIDIA "the single worst company we have ever dealt with" and ended his green comments with "NVIDIA: FUCK YOU!"..

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTEyMTc

YES ! Ha ha ha
Linus really does have a "pair" afterall.

"OptiMESS" is nvidia's fault, and NOT Linux's, so just FIX IT ALREADY nVidia, will ya ?!
Did I not hear a "door" just open for AMD ?! -Hello ! amd ?