Ubuntu 19.10 To Bundle NVIDIA's Proprietary Driver Packages As Part Of Its ISO

[vsteel]

Thank god, I get so tired of getting black screens when it first boots into the free driver. I always have to go in and mess with grub on boot up until I can get the Nvidia driver in because the non free driver just works for me. Do I care it is not free, no, I can always use the free driver if I need to or I can get an AMD card or use Intel graphics. I don't worry about the non free because I have a choice.

[andyprough]

Thank god, I get so tired of getting black screens when it first boots into the free driver. I always have to go in and mess with grub on boot up until I can get the Nvidia driver in because the non free driver just works for me. Do I care it is not free, no, I can always use the free driver if I need to or I can get an AMD card or use Intel graphics. I don't worry about the non free because I have a choice.

Who said you didn't have a choice? Obviously you have a choice.

[mike456]

Hopefully Nvidia will get updated with the rest of the os.

[Sonadow]

The hardware shops in my area only sell Nvidia cards, so a bundled proprietary driver is a nice thing to have.

But I still go for Nouveau where possible to avoid driver reinstallations after a kernel upgrade.

[kpedersen]

If you bothered looking at any linux newbie post on and forum or subreddit, you'd understand why they are doing this. If your first experience with Linux was you thinking it just killed your compiter, would you be here today?.

That's exactly my point. It doesn't install by default so a newbie will still think it "killed their computulator".

In my experience, most online Linux tutorials aimed at beginners get online and attached to the online package repo as quickly as possible so for a newbie; being able to install it off the dvd is of very little value. In fact I doubt any will even know it is there (or how to install a package from dvd).

I don't actually have an issue with proprietary software on a "quick 'n dirty" distro like Ubuntu; but not having it used by default is actually a bit unexpected. Imagine Solaris 10 using vesa by default rather than the packaged Nvidia binary? It kinda defeats the purpose.

[Weasel]

computulator

That's the greatest word I've ever heard on this forum.

[L_A_G]

Considering how badly Noveau works with fairly recent Nvidia cards this is unfortunately the only sane thing to do for a distro that's meant for, among others, newcomers to Linux.

Rage all you want about how your "freederps" being violated by this, but it doesn't change the fact that there is a very solid reasoning behind this decision. Ubuntu is supposed to be a fully featured ready-out-of-the-box desktop OS for regular desktop users meaning that it does need to include a lot of things that distros with other kinds of target audiences don't bother with. The whole complaint about bloat falls completely flat on it's face when you realize other distros for the same use case like Fedora workstation and Mint are all around the 2 GB mark.

[andyprough]

Rage all you want about how your "freederps" being violated by this, but it doesn't change the fact that there is a very solid reasoning behind this decision.

Who is raging? Look through the comments - not a single rage. People that spend $500 plus on a video card probably expect it to work. They have the choice of using free drivers or proprietary drivers. I say that as a libre-linux advocate. No one is trying to take away that choice.

I would say it would seem wiser to purchase a card which does not box you into a corner regarding whether you can suitably run free or non-free software. If you want to have the most choice, start before the point of purchase. After you've thrown large wads of cash at a card, you pretty much are stuck with what few choices that company provides you.

[lucrus]

The whole point here is not avoiding the NVidia drivers, but avoiding Ubuntu altogether. I'm glad Ubuntu exists, but I've never considered it a really free-as-in-free-speech distro. It's good as a first time distro to enter the FOSS world, and, under that perspective, it's good it bundles the drivers, even if they aren't free.

Then the newbie grows up and wants more, so he dumps the Ubuntu distro itself and he moves to Debian/Fedora/Arch/whatever serious distro he likes, where he finds out the real truth. So he writes his letter to Santa asking for a AMD card or a new notebook.

In the long term, it pays off.

[Mel Spektor]

Who is raging? Look through the comments - not a single rage. People that spend $500 plus on a video card probably expect it to work. They have the choice of using free drivers or proprietary drivers. I say that as a libre-linux advocate. No one is trying to take away that choice.

I would say it would seem wiser to purchase a card which does not box you into a corner regarding whether you can suitably run free or non-free software. If you want to have the most choice, start before the point of purchase. After you've thrown large wads of cash at a card, you pretty much are stuck with what few choices that company provides you.

I agree 100%, if you are considering choice, then AMD is the best, there are three implementations of Vulkan, (AMDGPU-PRO, AMDVLK, and RADV), three implementation of OpenCL, (AMDGPU-PRO, RoCM, Mesa), and different OpenGL implementations.