Linus Torvalds Calls NVIDIA The Worst Company Ever

[D0pamine]

don't think of non-free/closed-sourced/proprietary vs free/open-sourced/mine , think of it as magic vs science

gpu's are complicated beasts, to write a good open driver one needs to know how such a thing works

slightly off topic but has anyone got the hdmi audio working on an amd e-350 apu yet using the radeon driver?( oh wait no thats amd isn't it nvm )

[XorEaxEax]

Linux is at best a decent operating system

Compared to what? Also it's a kernel.

And if Google wanted to fess up the investment, they could easily convert Android over to a BSD or something else and have a mobile OS that is just as technologically capable as Linux if not superior.

Yeah, the reason Linux is huge in servers, dominates super computing and embedded is because companies 'could easily use anything else' which would be 'just as technologically capable if not superior'. Really?

Android is largely successful because it's not beholden to GPL insanity and FOSS fanatics.

All the FOSS and GPL attacking betrays you as just another anti-gpl troll.

And the fact is, that's where the consumer's preference has been: operating systems where their hardware works out of the box.

Linux supports more hardware out-of-the-box than Windows does, which in turn is due to all the open source drivers available in the kernel.

It took YEARS for many commercial entities to dip their toes into the Linux pool after being scared away by the fanatics.

Bullshit, show me anything supporting this statement, if this was even remotely true then BSD would be huge by now instead of slowly fading into obscurity.

Maybe it's time to look inside and see if there's anything inherent in the platform that makes it unattractive to a wide swath of businesses.

Obviously not since businesses are extremely attracted to Linux, what is this 'wide swath of businesses' which you speak of?

I love Linux of course

LOL

but if I couldn't use my NVIDIA video driver for whatever reason, it gets wiped from my disk and I go with the 99% of the world that actually uses their computers as a means to an end.

Oh no! And how on earth would you be prevented from using 'your' NVIDIA driver?

[johnc]

Yeah, the reason Linux is huge in servers, dominates super computing and embedded is because companies 'could easily use anything else' which would be 'just as technologically capable if not superior'. Really?

Even with stalled development Solaris is pretty much superior to Linux in many server scenarios. The SPARC hardware and support contracts aren't exactly cheap though and thus don't necessarily make it a smart choice for businesses.

Does Linux even have feature parity with ZFS yet? Nope. It's only been seven years now. And the ZFS code is 100% open source but since the licenses are incompatible, here we are with objectively inferior file systems in Linux.

Linux took off in the server space because it was free and ran on x86. That's just a fact. It had nothing to do with feature sets or FOSS principles.

[0xBADCODE]

Ohh, nVIDIA, your fans really love you

Some nvidia "fans" who were "too happy" with complete lack of divers for Nvidia Optimus for Linux have even created the following funny site to show their respect to Nvidia: http://drivers-for-optimus.enodev.org/

For those not familiar with Russian, approximate translation of (foul language!) text to English could be like that:

There are no fucking drivers!
Put this shit to garbage bin.

Though corrected nvidia logo picture is what actually delivers.
Seriously. Nvidia should change their logo! When hardware comes without drivers and documentation it's exactly like that!

[0xBADCODE]

Does Linux even have feature parity with ZFS yet? Nope.

Linux can serve most of real-world tasks, one way or another. It do not have to emulate ZFS (Solaris, BSD, ...) features exactly to do this. Linux can do volume management, raid levels and whatever. One way or another. And ZFS fans probably would find BTRFS quite cool thing at some point.

[XorEaxEax]

Even with stalled development Solaris is pretty much superior to Linux in many server scenarios. The SPARC hardware and support contracts aren't exactly cheap though and thus don't necessarily make it a smart choice for businesses.

'Big iron' is consistently losing ground to Linux and Windows in the server space so obviously what they offer in performance is found not being worth the comparative costs.

And the ZFS code is 100% open source but since the licenses are incompatible, here we are with objectively inferior file systems in Linux.

It was deliberately licenced to be incompatible with Linux (GPL) as they were competing with Linux and obviously didn't want to give away the competitive advantage ZFS offered.

Linux took off in the server space because it was free and ran on x86. That's just a fact. It had nothing to do with feature sets or FOSS principles.

The BSD's are also free and runs on x86, yet Linux dominates in the server space while the BSD's hardly register by comparison, despite your bullshit about how -'It took YEARS for many commercial entities to dip their toes into the Linux pool after being scared away by the fanatics.'.

Linux IS an extremely performant OS as proven by it being widely used in high performance computing (HPC), supercomputers/computing clusters (totally dominates here). The Linux devs take great pride in being performant as evident in this very video we are discussing were Linus goes on about an example of how Linux's pathname-lookup is faster than on anything else which was something the devs were micro-optimizing a while back to minimize cache misses while also making sure it scales perfectly.

[hoohoo]

I dunno what Linus is upset about, I have not watched the video yet. However the work I've done with OpenGL was done on Linux using NV card + NV proprietary driver and I had no problems. The work I've done with CUDA was on Linux and it worked very well indeed. I hope a pissing match does not develop between Linus and Jen Hsun, because I like NV on Linux.

[log0]

Some nvidia "fans" who were "too happy" with complete lack of divers for Nvidia Optimus for Linux have even created the following funny site to show their respect to Nvidia: http://drivers-for-optimus.enodev.org/

-> Драйверов блядь нет!

Hahaha! Almost fell off my chair!!

[float4]

"Init is too fancy, we only need a root shell"

[johnc]

The BSD's are also free and runs on x86, yet Linux dominates in the server space while the BSD's hardly register by comparison, despite your bullshit about how -'It took YEARS for many commercial entities to dip their toes into the Linux pool after being scared away by the fanatics.'.

Linux IS an extremely performant OS as proven by it being widely used in high performance computing (HPC), supercomputers/computing clusters (totally dominates here). The Linux devs take great pride in being performant as evident in this very video we are discussing were Linus goes on about an example of how Linux's pathname-lookup is faster than on anything else which was something the devs were micro-optimizing a while back to minimize cache misses while also making sure it scales perfectly.

I think Linus is over-esteeming himself though.

Ehhhh... Not sure that Linux "dominates" in the server space (assuming that "majority" doesn't translate to "dominate", and even then "majority" is questionable depending on which stats one looks at). Depends on the server type I guess. Yes, the BSDs are free and the BSDs had a large segment of the UNIX-like server market for quite awhile there, especially the web server market. But that was before the days of godaddy.com and $10/mo hosting fees. I'm not sure what that looks like now. But that wasn't the point I was making with my statement that you quoted, where I intended to point out that consumer-oriented software and hardware were, for a long time, not supported on Linux. I remember the days where "if it's not open source, GTFOff my system" were quite commonplace. I'm hoping that by now that mentality makes up a small minority of the Linux community. But it's somewhat prevalent on the forums here.

Linux does dominate the HPC sector... of which some of those systems are hooked into NVIDIA GPUs driven by those awfully horrible NVIDIA drivers.

On the desktop -- one of the biggest OS markets -- obviously Linux is practically non-existent. That's not by accident.

Within the past year Linux has taken a small majority in the smartphone market, completely driven by Android which for quite a long time was maligned in the Linux community because Google wasn't a team player. Now that Android is #1, the Linux community wants to brag about Android. Not to mention that Android's popularity would have been completely impossible if it weren't for the proprietary, closed-source binary blobs that people on this website are so frequent to deem the equivalent of Satan's spawn.

Linus was quick to brag about daily Android activations but didn't take the time to mention that driving many of those Android sales is that great Tegra SoC... made by "The Worst Company Ever".

And without Android Linux would be, again, practically non-existent in the mobile space... as it was just a short couple of years ago.

So personally I think Linus came off as a real childish turd. NVIDIA has helped and supported Linux plenty, in its own way, and much more than most companies out there have.