Developers Devising Plan To Ship Newer NVIDIA Drivers On Ubuntu Stable Releases

[stormcrow]

Its actually odd. I don't know a single person that has gone with nvidia blobs. Everyone I know is with the open amd drivers or intel.

Is nvidia still relevant now that open-source drivers are starting to really become competitive or is nvidia simply for users new to Linux who don't know any better? It might make for an interesting poll!

Wow, what a small bubble you live in! Nouveau isn't even close to being performant or feature complete enough, or even close to being stable enough, for many people. HPC GPGPU is entirely centered around the Nvidia proprietary stack. If you're using Nvidia graphics with the KDE desktop you're likely using Nvidia because nouveau is known to be crashy in combination (see the Fedora 30 bug for one such report, Kubuntu sometimes warns on install if it detects nouveau loaded as well). This has been a historical problem between KDE and nouveau. People playing games on Nvidia hardware, especially those with new hardware, are likely using the proprietary driver. Anyone using 10xx or newer Nvidia hardware are probably using the proprietary driver unless they're a driver developer, because nouveau is pretty awful on it regardless of desktop. I know from personal experience. To even reliably boot my laptop on most distros I have to issue a module_blacklist=nouveau on the kernel boot line.

So yes, this would be relevant for a lot of people. But I find it kind of strange. Canonical used to already have this option in Ubuntu LTS. One for the stable and rarely if ever updated initial driver offering, and the updates option where the package manager tracked updates. What happened to change it such that only the stable-never-updated-version was the only one offered? I've wondered for a while, but never bugged by it enough to find out.

[royce]

In one word, CUDA.

[betam4x]

This is literally a nonissue.

https://launchpad.net/~graphics-driv...ive/ubuntu/ppa

Launchpad is sloooww. Takes forever to do an upgrade from the graphics driver PPA.

[betam4x]

Its actually odd. I don't know a single person that has gone with nvidia blobs. Everyone I know is with the open amd drivers or intel.

Is nvidia still relevant now that open-source drivers are starting to really become competitive or is nvidia simply for users new to Linux who don't know any better? It might make for an interesting poll!

You must not know any gamers, Nouveau is useless for gaming. NVIDIA also has significantly higher market share (something like 80%?) vs AMD, so you can't make that argument either.

[Syfer]

You must not know any gamers, Nouveau is useless for gaming. NVIDIA also has significantly higher market share (something like 80%?) vs AMD, so you can't make that argument either.

Nvidia has 65% in gaming on linux stats: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/users/statistics. It has 75% on Steam hardware survey among all platforms, suggesting Linux users use Nvidia(and Intel) GPUs less than the general population. Meanwhile, AMD has 30% in GOL stats and 15% in Steam stats, which is quite the difference.

[betam4x]

Nvidia has 65% in gaming on linux stats: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/users/statistics. It has 75% on Steam hardware survey among all platforms, suggesting Linux users use Nvidia(and Intel) GPUs less than the general population. Meanwhile, AMD has 30% in GOL stats and 15% in Steam stats, which is quite the difference.

Both the steam survey and that user statistics URL you posted are useless. Many people don't game, and those that do may not use steam, likewise, I've never heard of gamingonlinux.com, so at the very least I haven't been polled. One example is System 76 ships a lot of offerings running Linux and NVidia GPUs. Those machines may be used in corporate environments. Likewise, many people use steam under Lutris, which would be reported as Windows. I have also never been polled by Steam under Linux, only under Windows, so I'm a false negative. My other 2 machines have never been polled, period. 1 is an AMD system and one is an NVIDIA system. Both run Windows. Only my main machine runs Linux.

[smitty3268]

Both the steam survey and that user statistics URL you posted are useless. Many people don't game, and those that do may not use steam, likewise, I've never heard of gamingonlinux.com, so at the very least I haven't been polled. One example is System 76 ships a lot of offerings running Linux and NVidia GPUs. Those machines may be used in corporate environments. Likewise, many people use steam under Lutris, which would be reported as Windows. I have also never been polled by Steam under Linux, only under Windows, so I'm a false negative. My other 2 machines have never been polled, period. 1 is an AMD system and one is an NVIDIA system. Both run Windows. Only my main machine runs Linux.

Beyond those obvious points, what kind of self-respecting gamer would use an Nvidia driver months out of date anyway? Gamers are the last group of people who are going to be interested in this.

It's obvious to me this is for the corporate workstation crowd.