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

[andre30correia]

A lot of hate, as always, it's good I buy a laptop with optimus first thing I do is installing nvidia non free drivers, the open source don't work well like amd ones, for gamers and desktop users who need cuda or better 3d render with nvidia card need their drivers, ofc my next laptop it will be a amd one with a amd gpu or one apu. When I buy this one amd open drivers are bad, not like now.

[tweak42]

Sad that they have to do it for newbie users, but I understand Canonical's reasoning why.

[Awesomeness]

This is a necessary step in that direction until AMD/Intel get off their gimpware gpu's, compete, and at least attempt to be ubiquitous in the market.

Proper dedicated Radeons compete with NVidia just fine, you just compare integrated GPUs with dedicated GPUs as is totally obvious by you mentioning Intel (who only do iGPUs) in the same sentence.

[vsteel]

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

If you go through the Nvidia comments over the years people have raged on about how there shouldn't be a single bit of non free code in the (*fill in any distro*) because it is the end of freedom.

I use Kubuntu and love the fact that 19.04 first booted up with the Nvidia driver and I didn't have to do anything.

[vsteel]

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.

If you use the Ubuntu graphics PPA you can run the latest greatest drivers and not need to worry about reinstalation. The package manager does it all for you, I have not had to do a reinstall of a graphics driver for a long time, even for kernel updates.

[L_A_G]

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.

Not raging? Did you even read the first page? Because it's practically nothing but people complaining about this so they clearly don't like the idea that this is being included and are using excuses like supposedly bloated ISOs when that's the size non-minimal desktop ISOs always are.

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.

At this point I'm not even sure what your argument is or if you even have one because you're just rambling. Anyone with any sense is going to look things up beforehand, but even then most computer users just don't give a damn about proprietary vs closed source, what matters to them is that stuff works and that it works well. On Nvidia, which has been the dominating player in the dedicated GPU market for quite some time, the proprietary driver is what generally works just about all the time.

[sokoban]

This is a very good idea because it makes it much easier to install and manage laptops with Optimus technology

[Guest]

They would be better off explicitly not supporting binary drivers at all, and letting the community provide them in a PPA. Isn't this sort of bundling a legal nightmare? Also, this forces everyone to download even more crap even if they're not going to use it, not to mention the fact that Ubuntu's ISOs have questionable software choices (entire LibreOffice on the disk, but git isn't there?)

[fuzz]

They would be better off explicitly not supporting binary drivers at all, and letting the community provide them in a PPA.

I agree but then they wouldn't be able to support their hardware vendor partners like Dell who want to ship with NVIDIA.

[Guest]

I agree but then they wouldn't be able to support their hardware vendor partners like Dell who want to ship with NVIDIA.

Nouveau exists. There's no reason to provide crappy NVIDIA drivers and drag the entire distro down to their low standards with delayed kernel and X.org updates.