Open-Source NVIDIA Vulkan Driver "NVK" Begins Running Talos Principle... Slowly

[dimko]

I would wager only people who only speak english would have an issue with it, and even then only very few people.

yours truly is not one of those. From many errors that I have made in my previous posts - you would certainly see it

[bridgman]

Yep - "... who don't speak French" would probably be more precise than "... who only speak English".

If you speak a bit of French it's a clever and easy-to-remember name... but if you don't then it's just hard to spell

[toughy]

If you were a French-speaking university student living in Paris and working on a new open source driver for NV hardware then calling it NouVeau ("new" in French) would seem like a pretty good idea, and the open source community seems to agree.

Well a project that is actually named new wold be a bad choice. Doing the same in a different language is not helping in my opinion. I guess they chose it because the old project was called nv, and someone thought "meh, it will have to do".

I took French classes in school (never liked it much) and the name nouveau was not an issue for me, but I see the problem for English-only speakers, and I would like to see the project renamed just for that. Like if I am from Romania and I make a project with a Romanian name, that would annoy more people, who don't speak the language, then it will help people that do. As it so happens, implementing NVK plus the new kernel module based on the NVIDIA code would be as good of a rename point as any.

[toughy]

It's also a lot of work changing names all over the codebase, graphic assets, documentation, etc... and more importantly, even once that's done any 3rd-party references to your software (especially blog posts, news, forum discussions, stackexchange and whatnot will forever be split with old content pointing towards the previous name, harming discovery

It would still be worth it !

[toughy]

So it is time to ask who will develop nouveau/nvk or fund this job? Nvidia? They don't need this, they are supporting linux themselves. Valve? They don't need this too, as long as there is good vulkan implementation from nvidia. FOSS zealots? They don't have enough money + they hate nvidia and nvidia customers.

There is another option: NVIDIA could do what Intel does and switch to the open-source driver entirely, and do away with the closed driver.

Also, as a FOSS enthusiast I am offended: I don't hate NVIDIA customers, I just think their ignorance is harmful to the rest of us.

[Khrundel]

There is another option: NVIDIA could do what Intel does and switch to the open-source driver entirely, and do away with the closed driver.

Of course they won't. They are using parts of their windows driver code, which they don't want to open, which can contain some patented things or even some licensed 3rd party code. AMD, for example, some time ago gave promise to opensource their linux vulkan driver eventually. Looks like they've broken this promise. It is not easy for corp to opensource even new driver, developed with future opening in mind. Opensourcing their opengl implementation wasn't even promised.

Also, as a FOSS enthusiast I am offended: I don't hate NVIDIA customers, I just think their ignorance is harmful to the rest of us.

Hmm... "I don't hate you, I just think you are ignorant and doing harm for everyone".

Perhaps personally you do not hate anyone. But community as a whole - certainly. Just from the top of my memory, there was command line option --my-next-gpu-wont-be-nvidia with "do not open bugs" policy with sway. Or recent story with implicit sync. Nvidia had prepared patch for some infrastructure project (don't remember it was glamor or xorg) to fix some issues with xwayland. Being aware of hatred to them, they've got support from opensource intel and amd driver developers, who agreed implicit sync is inferior to explicit. Their patch was rejected by maintainer with "You haven't proved this change will bring tangible improvement for opensource driver stack". For me "this will fix things for nvidia users and won't harm another" would be enough, but FOSS gatekeeper thinks even wayland adoption, a holly cow of modern GUI stack, doesn't worth accepting nvidia patch

[smitty3268]

I took French classes in school (never liked it much) and the name nouveau was not an issue for me, but I see the problem for English-only speakers

As a native english speaker, I think the name rolls of the tongue quite nicely when speaking but I can confirm it's impossible to spell correctly without googling the name first. Way too many vowels.