NVIDIA 495 Linux Beta Driver Released With GBM Support

[Danny3]

Really glad that KDE and Sway developers didn't bend over and told Nvidia to fuck off and cut their crap !
This is what all open source developers should do against shitty attitude companies.

It's so funny that Nvidia realized that KDE Plasma getting too big to ignore and their users were always complaining everywhere when they tried to activate the Wayland session.

I still can't believe that people put up with this crap for so long instead of just buying AMD.

Anyway, congrats to KDE ans Sway developers !

[tildearrow]

7 years had to pass for this. What a shame on NVIDIA's part.
The community would have been healthier if GBM was implemented first.

[ridge]

All my Christmases have come at once...

[Myownfriend]

I'm happy it works for you, but that's not real fractional scaling. Apps aren't aware of the scaling factor. A compositor simply tells them to scale to the next integer value (mostly 200%) and then downsamples the pixmap to fit your scale.

That assumes that the applications would even know what to do with fractional scaling. GTK doesn't support fractional scaling at all. QT supports it but not without issues like thin borders not drawing. The way that scaling is done on Wayland is the same way that MacOS does it.

It's not good for font rendering and personally I see no reason to use it. In fact, it feels like regression from what we have on X11, even though it's just a single, global scale.

Having difference scaling factors per monitor is the difference between the scaling be useful or useless. My experience with fractional scaling in X11 involved some applications scaling down by 50% which made text unreadable on both of my displays. The mouse movement would also scale down 50% so it felt sluggish. There wasn't much that was good about it.

[vb_linux]

Did not test it due to 470 having issues for me, 465 worked better for my setup.

So, 470 had the rebar support. This just brings an indicator to show if it is on or not.

[oiaohm]

I do wonder if someone with this Nvidia change will attempt the X11 bare metal modeset driver for everything again.

[pal666]

So, what is necessary to get Wayland working with GBM on Ubuntu 20.04?

- This Driver
- Latest Mesa through ppa???
- Latest x.org through ppa???

much simpler way:
- no novideo hardware
that's all

[pal666]

7 years had to pass for this. What a shame on NVIDIA's part.
The community would have been healthier if GBM was implemented first.

community could try to stop financing the most linux hating vendor

[SofS]

Huh, so when this is correct, they seem to have changed the plan to drop Kepler on Linux after 470 branch. That'd be good news.

Depends on what they mean by 470 branch, maybe it will be supported for any 47# version?

Would be awesome if they end it with proper Wayland infrastructure, a tremendous message for those who rely on their direct support. Personally I would rather have had it open source so all of this would not even had been an issue, but alas, given it is not open source this is the best alternative.

[bug77]

That hasn't stopped compositors from implementing it and implementing it well. I've used fractional scaling under Windows, Gnome w/ X11, and Gnome w/ Wayland and Gnome with Wayland has had by far the best fractional scaling I've used. I don't even have the same amount of scaling across monitors and it works really well.

It can't be implemented well without support from Wayland. It's implemented by rendering everything at a higher resolution and downscaling. This is both wasteful of resources and makes it impossible to use subpixel hinting for antialiasing.

What are you comparing it to that suggests Wayland is holding itself back?

Nothing in particular, just user's needs. Simple things like clipboard functionality, screen sharing weren't even implemented properly for years because Wayland designers didn't think about them.
Also you will notice the discussion around Wayland is still mostly stuck at DEs. Very few apps actually support Wayland and of those that do, they don't use it by default.

Fun fact: Wayland is now over a third of X's age, but nowhere near a third of X's adoption.