NVIDIA Presents Its Driver Plans To Support Mir/Wayland & KMS On Linux

[liam]

RedHat?

Well, as one of the biggest spenders in open source software, they are doing a damn poor job at exploiting people.

[System25]

So nvidia still lacks opensource strategy? Big win for AMD and Intel then.

So Nvidia haven't got it and still lacks opensource strategy. FAIL. As an obvius example: when you boot system from live CD or flash, opensource drivers would be plug-n-play, rebootless solution. And its only Nvidia which would work like 3rd rate crap. Intel and AMD would be truly plug-n-play in this regard. Mr. Torvalds, please repeat: these Nvidia dullards still haven't got it.

[johnc]

So Nvidia haven't got it and still lacks opensource strategy. FAIL. As an obvius example: when you boot system from live CD or flash, opensource drivers would be plug-n-play, rebootless solution. And its only Nvidia which would work like 3rd rate crap. Intel and AMD would be truly plug-n-play in this regard. Mr. Torvalds, please repeat: these Nvidia dullards still haven't got it.

Yeah and 0.0001% of people boot from a live CD or install their own OS.

I'm sure nvidia's pocketbook is hurting big-time.

[nanonyme]

Yeah and 0.0001% of people boot from a live CD or install their own OS.

I'm sure nvidia's pocketbook is hurting big-time.

Oh, who did you get to install your OS for you then?

[System25]

Yeah and 0.0001% of people boot from a live CD or install their own OS.

I'm sure nvidia's pocketbook is hurting big-time.

1) As user I do not have to care about Nvidia's pocketbooks (unless I am stakeholder). I would rather care about my convenience. And installing drivers in lame MS-DOSish ways, with extra downloads, installers and reboots ... is so 80'ish. Sure, there're poor bastards who haven't heard about plug-n-play even in 2014. However, plug-n-play experience IMO counts as advantage. Okay, let competitors to gain some small but neat bonus .
2) It can be convenient to have live flash to boot in case of emergency. Obviously fully featured system is warmly welcome. Its not fun to use crippled system where things you've used daily are failing.
3) OSes are often installed by humans and they do not like to be treated like third-rate shit, btw. This can lead to negative reputation.
4) I would care about proper system intergration. So driver should be integral part of system, developed together with kernel. But of course nvidia nuts can enjoy by the inability to build kernel module for 3 kernel releases like it happened recently, etc. Since kernel devs just do not care about proprietary crap and changing interfaces in ways it fits them. And Nvidia is not a part of this process. So they doomed to face unpleasant situations here and there. It not going improve over time unless nvidia morons will get some very simple idea: proprietary code is not part of Linux and unwelcome. AMD finally got it, btw. Intel did it ages ago.
5) I would care about lack of ripoff and unpopular decisions. That's one of major reasons to use open software. Sure, maybe someone enjoys the fact nvidia removed support of "extra" displays in recent drivers, reducing number of supported displays. But I would not rely on proprietary crap to avoid such ripoff landing my head somewhere in the middle of systems usage. This single reason is enough to keep miles away from proprietary solutions: you can expect ripoff and blatant abuse of the fact you can't override unpopular decision, no matter what.

As extra bonus I can remember some chinese order, about something like 10M PCs or so. The uncommon thing about it was the fact China uses MIPS architecture a lot and Nvidia neither can build their driver for MIPS nor they have open solution. So nvidia lost fairly large contract. Whole idea behind PCI and now PCI-E is that it is not bound to particular platform. So there is nothing wrong if PCI-E bus comes out from ARM or MIPS IC, etc. The most ironic part about it is that Nvidia has been kicked out x86 market at least twice. First time AMD and Intel got their own chipsets and Nvidia lost chipset business. Now AMD and Intel processors got integrated GPUs, seriously reducing market of low-end discrete cards. And ... hmm, nvidia can't make x86 CPUs at all. Nor they can make whole x86 system. So this road leads to nowhere and they should be really retarded to ignore that fact. Sure, you can have large market share and so on. But if you'll behave like a dullard it will end quite soon. And Nvidia's stubbornness about x86-only and proprietary solitions looks like nice try to shoot own legs since I wouldn't bet on their bright future on this markes since it mostly controlled by Intel and AMD who both got GPUs as well as other system components so they do not really need Nvidia in long term.

[Temar]

Only if distrowatch is your sole source of truth. And that's for desktop use only, and only God knows how they collect those stats or what they mean.

johnc is right - you can stick a fork in Canonical. They played their hand. They could not or would not feel the pulse of the community for whatever specific reason Shuttleworth has or had and now they are going to pay the price of becoming irrelevant. Period, end of story.

Hmm, let's look at some more sources:

http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey?platform=linux

41% Ubuntu 14.04 x64
6% Ubuntu 14.04

About half of the Linux Userbase on Steam uses Ubuntu, not counting the other Ubuntu versions.

You think that's because Ubuntu is the officially supported distribution? Then let's look at Wikipedia:

http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportOperatingSystems.htm

Again, the same picture. So at least when it comes to the desktop, Ubuntu is by far the most popular distribution.

I'm sure when you look at servers, RedHat or Debian will be number one. The majority of servers however don't need an Nvidia card nor the Nvidia driver.

[Anarchy]

So Nvidia haven't got it and still lacks opensource strategy. FAIL. As an obvius example: when you boot system from live CD or flash, opensource drivers would be plug-n-play, rebootless solution. And its only Nvidia which would work like 3rd rate crap. Intel and AMD would be truly plug-n-play in this regard. Mr. Torvalds, please repeat: these Nvidia dullards still haven't got it.

I'm sorry to tell you but you don't matter to Nvidia, neither do I. Their main Linux buyers aren't consumers but companies. On Linux they make the bulk of their money selling Quadros and Teslas and those buyers absolutely don't give a shit whether the drivers are open or closed source. All they care is that they're functional, stable and well supported. Everything else doesn't matter except to nvidia.

[blackout23]

Hmm, let's look at some more sources:

http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey?platform=linux

41% Ubuntu 14.04 x64
6% Ubuntu 14.04

About half of the Linux Userbase on Steam uses Ubuntu, not counting the other Ubuntu versions.

You think that's because Ubuntu is the officially supported distribution? Then let's look at Wikipedia:

http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportOperatingSystems.htm

Again, the same picture. So at least when it comes to the desktop, Ubuntu is by far the most popular distribution.

I'm sure when you look at servers, RedHat or Debian will be number one. The majority of servers however don't need an Nvidia card nor the Nvidia driver.

As far as I know *buntu flavors all identify themselves as Ubuntu when you go to Help -> System Information in Steam so they are part of the 41% and 6%.

[johnc]

Oh, who did you get to install your OS for you then?

I am part of the 0.0001% and the fact that I had to go in to Jockey and enable the nvidia drivers after install and then reboot was not a major inconvenience for me, and hasn't made me any less likely to buy nvidia products.

[johnc]

Since kernel devs just do not care about proprietary crap and changing interfaces in ways it fits them. And Nvidia is not a part of this process. So they doomed to face unpleasant situations here and there. It not going improve over time unless nvidia morons will get some very simple idea: proprietary code is not part of Linux and unwelcome. AMD finally got it, btw. Intel did it ages ago.

Any time somebody makes something as complex as a GPU, they're always going to be doomed to face unpleasant situations. I'm sure making their Windows driver is no bowl of rainbows either. Have you seen nvidia's unofficial OS X driver? They probably cry themselves to sleep over it.

You bring up AMD and Intel as examples. But which vendor currently has the best-performing Linux driver with the most features? It's not AMD or Intel. You may like the fact that they're open -- I'm not going to criticize your preference -- but that's not how the GPU market works. People drop $400 on a GPU rather than $350 because they want to squeeze out that little extra bit of performance. They're always downloading the latest drivers to get the best performance. When AMD or Intel are producing the BEST driver on the platform then we can herald their strategy.

5) I would care about lack of ripoff and unpopular decisions. That's one of major reasons to use open software. Sure, maybe someone enjoys the fact nvidia removed support of "extra" displays in recent drivers, reducing number of supported displays. But I would not rely on proprietary crap to avoid such ripoff landing my head somewhere in the middle of systems usage. This single reason is enough to keep miles away from proprietary solutions: you can expect ripoff and blatant abuse of the fact you can't override unpopular decision, no matter what.

By this standard, how well do the open drivers compare to the closed ones? For how long did Catalyst have far more features than Radeon? And even now I'm not sure that Radeon has completely caught up. Do the Intel Linux drivers expose all the features available on Windows?

As extra bonus I can remember some chinese order, about something like 10M PCs or so. The uncommon thing about it was the fact China uses MIPS architecture a lot and Nvidia neither can build their driver for MIPS nor they have open solution. So nvidia lost fairly large contract.

I think that story was fabricated. As it went, AMD ended up getting this contract because they have "open" drivers but this mysterious big contract never showed up in AMD's financials. Besides, any time you hear "China wants to use..." what it really means is that China wants access to the IP, and they're going to rip it off and rip it out and use it as their own because they have zero patent protection laws over there.

Whole idea behind PCI and now PCI-E is that it is not bound to particular platform. So there is nothing wrong if PCI-E bus comes out from ARM or MIPS IC, etc. The most ironic part about it is that Nvidia has been kicked out x86 market at least twice. First time AMD and Intel got their own chipsets and Nvidia lost chipset business. Now AMD and Intel processors got integrated GPUs, seriously reducing market of low-end discrete cards. And ... hmm, nvidia can't make x86 CPUs at all. Nor they can make whole x86 system. So this road leads to nowhere and they should be really retarded to ignore that fact. Sure, you can have large market share and so on. But if you'll behave like a dullard it will end quite soon. And Nvidia's stubbornness about x86-only and proprietary solitions looks like nice try to shoot own legs since I wouldn't bet on their bright future on this markes since it mostly controlled by Intel and AMD who both got GPUs as well as other system components so they do not really need Nvidia in long term.

Come on, man... you're totally phoning it in here. NVIDIA has been working with ARM SoCs for a long time now, and they've been developing their own (Denver) ever since the x86 license idea fell through, which was many years ago. How could they possibly be "ignoring the fact" about the x86 business? How are they "stubborn" and "x86-only" when they actually make an ARM-based CPU and dedicate a significant amount of R&D to it? They're the only vendor that even has a discrete GPU driver for ARM! AMD was late to other CPUs, and Intel is 100% committed to x86.

But nvidia is criticized as the company that's "x86-only".