It's Been Three Years Since Linus Torvalds' Huge NVIDIA Rant

[duby229]

I don't know, games can have some pretty complicated use of audio. Let's say you're gaming away on your PC-connected stereo, and the wife and kid get home... then you want to switch to a headset. Are you supposed to quit your match in the middle to deal with that?

That is a pretty good point. USB and BT headsets most times have their own audio chipset integrated. In fact I have run into similar problems myself. Many, many, many games will -not- alt-tab out cleanly.

[AlanGriffiths]

It's not like Ubuntu has decided not to support Wayland, you know. Ubuntu was the first distro that supported Wayland, continues to do so, and always will. And of course, Ubuntu still is used as the basis for the official Wayland reference distro.

Why has it become so important for people to split the Free Software community this way? I support all Free Software development, even if I'm more interested in some projects than others.

AFAIK there isn't a war between the developers of Mir and Wayland (or even Mir and Weston which is at least comparing apples).

The most significant difference is that Mir provides an API where Weston provides a set of Wayland-based protocols. But the IPC mechanism is an insignificant part of the investment in Mir and could, at least in principle, be changed. Convergence may not be a short or medium term goal but it is possible.

[mdias]

Games aren't audio DAW software. The latter need more sophisticated controls, the former don't.

DAW software was just - as stated - an example. It is subjective wether you need more sophisticated controls in games or audio, so I will not comment on that.

And games are special applications when compared to spefic audio software. The latter can require JACK, but for games that's not acceptable, plus games are typically closed-source binaries.

Maybe games are special applications to you. But not to your computer/OS.
What's the difference between requiring different backends in audio world, and requiring different backends (OGL,D3D,...) in graphics world? The comparison is fair.

I don't have faith in them to handle audio selection right at all, nor should the developers spend time on that, since the OS controls are specifically made for that instead.

You don't have to trust anything. You would have, as I said, "run profiles" that could control what your game/app is allowed to access. Including multiple graphics and audio devices if wanted.
Again, the default is just the default. You could set a specific game to play through your headphones while keeping your OS default setting as your speakers. You could also set your OS to switch between discrete or integrated graphics as default depending on your laptop charger being connected, and allowing apps to access only the OS default.
Is there any scenario that wouldn't work this way? Because your way would take away some scenarios...

[oleid]

Nvidia, performance-wise, is hands-down the best on Linux. AMD has always been buggy, but at least they are working with the community.[...]

You call AMD buggy? Ever tried nvidia-340 on GNOME3? gedit is barely usable. I'd use a newer one, but anything older than GeForce 400 doesn't work with later drivers.

[duby229]

You call AMD buggy? Ever tried nvidia-340 on GNOME3? gedit is barely usable. I'd use a newer one, but anything older than GeForce 400 doesn't work with later drivers.

IMO the catalyst have been horribly buggy. I just honestly can't understand how AMD could let some of their past catalyst releases get released. Some of them were so bad. Horribly bad.

EDIT: In fact so bad that If I was AMD I would ditch the catalyst branding ASAP. I honestly believe things are going to be better with the new infrastructure. I think it deserves new branding.

[pal666]

Nvidia, performance-wise, is hands-down the best on Linux

nvidia's linux driver is called nouveau, and performance-wise it is far from the best
no, windows blob with shim is not linux driver

[Max Payne]

Fuck you nvidia
And fuck you AMD too for not wanting to save us from these bastards

+ 1

Nvidia introduced SLI support in 2008 and it is still completely broken for single monitor users, they should just reimburse every Linux user that bought a second card.

They take advantage that most people only use a single card to say that their proprietary driver is excellent, but then it turns to excrement when you try to use a second card.

[Luke]

They need to stop locking their cards to signed firmware. If this is really about Chinese vendors reflashing small cards with the firmware from larger ones, each card could instead be programmed on-die to blacklist the firmware of any other card in it's line, and possibly insert a "watermark" boot screen wnen booting with 3ed party/nonriginal firmware such as that generated by Nouveau. This would make scammer's cards unmarketable without requiring Nvidia to sign firmware for Nouveau. It would NOT be acceptable to insert a watermark into the desktop or into openGL applications. I won't buy any locked card, motherboard, CPU, or device.

[Luke_Wolf]

IMO the catalyst have been horribly buggy. I just honestly can't understand how AMD could let some of their past catalyst releases get released. Some of them were so bad. Horribly bad.

EDIT: In fact so bad that If I was AMD I would ditch the catalyst branding ASAP. I honestly believe things are going to be better with the new infrastructure. I think it deserves new branding.

Nvidia Card Killing Drivers: 3
AMD/ATi Card Killing Drivers: 0

Plus Nvidia is about as guilty as AMD in regards to breaking games, has nasty desktop tearing issues and so on...

[DeepDayze]

They need to stop locking their cards to signed firmware. If this is really about Chinese vendors reflashing small cards with the firmware from larger ones, each card could instead be programmed on-die to blacklist the firmware of any other card in it's line, and possibly insert a "watermark" boot screen wnen booting with 3ed party/nonriginal firmware such as that generated by Nouveau. This would make scammer's cards unmarketable without requiring Nvidia to sign firmware for Nouveau. It would NOT be acceptable to insert a watermark into the desktop or into openGL applications. I won't buy any locked card, motherboard, CPU, or device.

I would say that would be the most logical approach by NVIDIA in relation to the signed firmware images issue with Nouveau and that should not be too hard to implement within their firmware infrastructure.

Nvidia Card Killing Drivers: 3
AMD/ATi Card Killing Drivers: 0

Plus Nvidia is about as guilty as AMD in regards to breaking games, has nasty desktop tearing issues and so on...

I thought ATI/AMD had more issues with card-killing drivers than NVIDIA