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

[johnc]

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...

Nvidia is better; let's not kid ourselves.

[Luke_Wolf]

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

I've never heard of AMD drivers killing cards for as long as I've been paying attention, on the other hand I know of at least 3 times that Nvidia drivers have killed cards

[Ardje]

I started hating NVidia when they started suing 3dfx on soft patents (patents about things I already learned at school before nvidia patented it), putting a final nail in the coffin of 3dfx.
Now I rather throw 10x as much money at amd/ati to produce hardware/software that has a very good opensource driver support and an awkward but more or less working proprietary driver.
Throwing money at a company that has no intentions to step forward in open support is just making sure that the future will stay that way.
I'm not even mad at binary blobs. The richard stallman rule about open source is that it should be practical. It has no use to request the source of the controller in your fridge. (Although that has been changed now samsung fridges and washing machines run linux).
The next step might be open firmware, but at this stage it's not interesting yet.
The moment you can actively contribute or fix bugs it makes sense.
Other reasons for wanting to see the insides of the blobs is to be able to do security audits. Like broadcom's NIC's are MIPS based CPU's with hardware glue to interface the mips to the dumb nic and the host bus (pcie). They do what they want independently of the host cpu, and if you don't have an I/O mmu, they probably have full memory access from the NIC.

[arabek]

About the firmware - it seems NVIDIA is getting up to speed and preparing for a release:

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/nouveau/2015-June/021255.html

[devius]

You make it sound as if the goal of Mir is to defeat Wayland. It seems that parts of the community now thinks this applies to everything and that everything must be a conflict and a battle to be won. Different ideas must not coexist any more, I guess. If you like Chromium, then you must continuously attack Firefox, because it doesn't use WebKit.

...

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.

Most reasonable comment on Phoronix ever :O I applaud your peace-making effort although it won't do any good because we're constantly being bombarded with the "Us vs Them" mentality.

[ZophiasDad]

Hello all,
To the many Nvidia detractors that I see especially Linus Torvalds need to step back and look at the over all big picture. Yes Nvidia like most Windozzzz hardware manufactures are not open source friendly however I view things a lot differently. I have been a dual, multi booter since 2000 and building my own systems since 2001 and back then and for many many years there was a vast majority of devices that simply would not work on Linux, graphics cards, printers drawing tablets etc etc. I would classify myself as a Pragmatist with respect to device drivers on Linux and not an open source purists! I just want my shit to work seamlessly as I go from OS to OS at boot time. In my book Nvidia should be praised because ever since I have been building systems I have chosen Nvidia GPUs, why you may ask? The reason is very simple; Nvidia has always cared about Linux because they have always provided good drivers for their hardware for many many years when the majority of companies even today could care less about Linux and will only start providing drivers when they are forced to by market pressure. Yes they are closed source drivers and to many that is worse than demon possession but not me, I am an avid gamer and is the only reason I still run Windows at all is to play the hundreds of Windows only games that are in my Steam library. I just built a new gaming small form factor PC that dual boots between Windows 7 ultimate and SteamOS and currently about 1/3 of my Steam game library runs on Linux and my system transitions smoothly from Windows to SteamOS. So from my perspective a Big Thanks should go out to Nvidia not a fuck you with the middle finger extended.

[AsuMagic]

Mir support comes when?

Oh lol. I found this thread by luck. This comment aged like milk