NVIDIA Contributes Much Less To The Linux Kernel Than Intel Or AMD

[rogerx]

I think Keith Packard's video on X11's early development really explains this in a nutshell, proprietary coding by corporations is ungodly slow and cumbersome, with the exception of Intel of course. Reminds me of VIM versus Emacs wars, subsequently Keith knows Richard Stallman (author of Emacs) very well, .... and so on.

See Phoronix's recent past article/video, "Keith Packard Talks About Sustaining X11's Development"

I prefer Intel CPU's and NVidia GPU's. However, recently I wasted $100-200 on an AMD video card that failed to work on a recent system due to the system's motherboard not being able to boot UFI. While none of NVidia graphics cards exhibited similar problems, seemingly booting just fine with older MBR partitions. A simple statement within the product's system requirements, require UFI BIOS would have been sufficient, instead ominously omitted.

I must commend the author at Phoronix for having some focus where he's going in life! Nice work.

[piotrj3]

Let's ignore the fact Intel makes CPUs, Wifi, ethernet, chipsets, iGPU, has own linux distro etc.

Let's ignore the fact AMD makes CPUs, chipsets, iGPUs.

Nvidia just GPUs + tegra SoC.

Even if Nvidia did have perfect open source gpu driver, they would be still waaay behind in code lines to Intel/AMD due to simply fields they do. And seriously I prefer closed blob of Nvidia with day 1 good GPU support, then AMD that has only support via git kernel some solid time after release. Best of course here is Intel that adds support for hardware way before it is released.

[R41N3R]

There was nothing insightful about it.

NVIDIA supports Linux as much as it needs and wants to. It does not owe anyone anything. People here somehow believe otherwise. Since Linux exists, you must support it or you're "bad". That's so childish and stupid I've got no words.

Nvidia is just childish. Linux is about getting code and giving code back. If they cannot behave why would you defend them?

[bash2bash]

For many years I used nvidia cards and I struggled to get them working with Linux, because I always had to deal with their binary drivers.

Eventually I realized there is no need for all that suffering, the AMD cards do the same thing and don't require anything extra, they just work with full acceleration without any extra software or binary drivers.

Since I moved to AMD I have never looked back. Honestly, when using Linux as a desktop, nvidia is irrelevant.

[Aryma]

NVIDIA contribute by making wayland more useless

[stiiixy]

rhavenn If I recall, AMD committed to open sourcing within twelve momths of acquitong ATI. In 2006. The legal quagmire took long enough, then they had to rebuild from the ground up, and then they released GCN, and now again AM4/UEFI era cutoff, but it would theyre now in a position to handle new things more readily and with resulting quicker turnaround than previous.

Two years is a slight exageration.

[AdamOne]

The "huge announcement" Nvidia is preparing will be:
More Nvidia!
Complete lack of awareness of their own ego, lol.

[pabloski]

NVIDIA supports Linux as much as it needs and wants to. It does not owe anyone anything. People here somehow believe otherwise. Since Linux exists, you must support it or you're "bad". That's so childish and stupid I've got no words.

No problem. I, as a consumer, WILL NOT buy their crap. Simple.

Companies try to make their costumers happy. If they don't want FOSS customers, then we will buy AMD and Intel hardware.

[birdie]

No problem. I, as a consumer, WILL NOT buy their crap. Simple.

Companies try to make their costumers happy. If they don't want FOSS customers, then we will buy AMD and Intel hardware.

You think too MUCH of yourself. You're da king, right? I mean a community which has less than 2% of the market share talks as if each company owes you their time, money and resources. LOL.

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/videocard/

People do vote for NVIDIA and you're entitled not to buy their GPUs ever.

[CochainComplex]

This is unsurprising, AMD and Intel both have CPUs and GPUs (or at the very least iGPUs) that require code, meanwhile Nvidia only has GPUs and maintains it's main driver code outside of the kernel in the first place...

So... Tell us something we don't know? If, to be fair to nvidia, you remove all CPU and GPU (or at least GPU Driver) related code, will it still be contributing 'much less' than both amd and intel? I strongly doubt it, this is just meaningless bashing of nvidia here. Nvidia only does dedicated GPUs. AMD only does CPUs and GPUs, intel does a shitload of things (and maintains clearlinux as some icing on that cake) other than CPUs and GPUs, so again, if you ignore intel's contributions except directly related to CPU and GPU, is intel still as far ahead of amd and nvidia too? I doubt this too.

but well there are these arm based nvidia chips as well - tegra and co running mainly with android. I think i dont have to mention that under the hood android has a linux kernel.