The Maintainer Of The NVIDIA Open-Source "Nouveau" Linux Kernel Driver Resigns

[NeoMorpheus]

I wonder why RedHat would burn money on something like this when nVidia itself has done nothing but crap all over libre software efforts over the years.

Strange. Anyway, hat tip to Ben, he's quite a trooper.

Maybe they have the same fanatics that we have here, kissing Dear Leader Jensen's ass, instead of giving him the middle finger and buying AMD, which does care for open source.

[You-]

This is a cautionary tale to buy hardware that officially supports the OS you want.

Why?

The stuff that worked yesterday will continue to work tomorrow.

Stuff that didnt work yesterday or had issues may have less issues or might start to work tomorrow. In fact with the code drop earlier in the day, they are already in a better state than they were!

I get avoiding nvidia. I have never advocated them for decades now and wish intel/AMD all the best in destroying them, but this news article has no relevance to such things.

[NSLW]

He was a paid employee. He developed nouveau for a living. Any idea if RedHat plans to replace him with another employee?

[kurkosdr]

I bought many PCs with Nvidia GPUs and used "Desktop Linux" on them with zero issues. What was I thinking? That I want a hassle free experience, and the official Nvidia drivers provide that.

I also have zero issues with AI stuff like Stable Diffusion running on my GPU on Linux.

You?

I haven't heard good things about Nvidia's official Wayland drivers, and Wayland is the future of Desktop Linux.

[reba]

I bought many PCs with Nvidia GPUs and used "Desktop Linux" on them with zero issues. What was I thinking? That I want a hassle free experience, and the official Nvidia drivers provide that.

I also have zero issues with AI stuff like Stable Diffusion running on my GPU on Linux.

You?

But can it run Wayland?

Just to add: SD also runs well on my Nvidia dGPU, but desktops run on the AMD iGPU. So for me the best of both worlds, especially as I can disable and de-power the Nvidia GPU when not in use (AI, games) and the desktop stays functional and at a very low power usage on AMD (the Nvidia card has very bad idle power usage even with their special souce binary driver if not de-powered completely, glad that works)

The Nvidia card is a good co-processor card but nothing I would rely my system on. If the dGPU would be a beefy AMD, I would be even happier.

[gripped]

This is a cautionary tale to buy hardware that officially supports the OS you want.

If you already have a PC that you run Windows on and you are trying out Desktop Linux, I guess having some Desktop Linux drivers available is a good thing, but you see people buying PCs with Nvidia GPUs or Apple Silicon Macbooks to run "Desktop Linux" and you can't help but think "What were they thinking?".

Don't buy expensive hardware because you think some person writing third-party drivers in their free time will keep doing so.

What a load of flannel.

There is an official Nvidia Linux driver. May not be in the format many want but it exists and has for a long time.

[Nori]

Because we believe in open software, as a philosophy and as a strategy. We invest in Linux's future, because we don't have a future without it. It's no exaggeration to say that none of this conversation would be happening if Linux wasn't The platform for OpenGL. People are going to buy NVIDIA hardware for that, and we can't support hardware we can't drive ourselves, so we need something open and credible.

You don't have to like my employer, its parent company, or our products - believe me, I'm right there with you some days - but our motivations really are pretty transparent. We don't do closed drivers because we can't fix them, and if we can't fix them we can't support you. We don't do out-of-tree drivers because the whole point is to get them upstream so everyone keeps them stable and everyone wins, because we are a big part of that everyone. We work on the desktop because without that Linux is a niche OS, competing with QNX and NetWare instead of WIndows and macOS, and that means nobody knows how to use it or develop for it and that means we don't have a talent pool to hire from, or, like, customers.

So why undermine a well-functioning Nvidia blob with an unfinished Wayland where it doesn't work?

[nwnk]

I wonder why RedHat would burn money on something like this when nVidia itself has done nothing but crap all over libre software efforts over the years.

Because we believe in open software, as a philosophy and as a strategy. We invest in Linux's future, because we don't have a future without it. It's no exaggeration to say that none of this conversation would be happening if Linux wasn't The platform for OpenGL. People are going to buy NVIDIA hardware for that, and we can't support hardware we can't drive ourselves, so we need something open and credible.

You don't have to like my employer, its parent company, or our products - believe me, I'm right there with you some days - but our motivations really are pretty transparent. We don't do closed drivers because we can't fix them, and if we can't fix them we can't support you. We don't do out-of-tree drivers because the whole point is to get them upstream so everyone keeps them stable and everyone wins, because we are a big part of that everyone. We work on the desktop because without that Linux is a niche OS, competing with QNX and NetWare instead of WIndows and macOS, and that means nobody knows how to use it or develop for it and that means we don't have a talent pool to hire from, or, like, customers.

[Weasel]

This is a cautionary tale to buy hardware that officially supports the OS you want.

If you already have a PC that you run Windows on and you are trying out Desktop Linux, I guess having some Desktop Linux drivers available is a good thing, but you see people buying PCs with Nvidia GPUs or Apple Silicon Macbooks to run "Desktop Linux" and you can't help but think "What were they thinking?".

I bought many PCs with Nvidia GPUs and used "Desktop Linux" on them with zero issues. What was I thinking? That I want a hassle free experience, and the official Nvidia drivers provide that.

I also have zero issues with AI stuff like Stable Diffusion running on my GPU on Linux.

You?

[kurkosdr]

NVIDIA knows the importance of software, that's why CUDA is where it is today (which is everywhere), and why they have a trillion dollar market cap.

Good luck making the average Desktop Linux person understand that the NVIDIA drivers are not some silly serialization code that the manufacturer keeps closed out of spite but are in fact a collection of highly-complex runtimes, I've been trying that for the past 15 years and didn't make any progress

Not only is one of those APIs (CUDA) exclusive to Nvidia (read: unique selling point), but Nvidia has a reputation of being the best implementer of the other APIs (OpenGL, DirectX, OpenCL). Why would they give that away to please the whatever percent of the 1.5% of Desktop Linux users that use an Nvidia GPU on Desktop Linux? They won't.

Though personally I don't see why ROCm is a joke other than CUDA having a huge installed base due to an early lead (I understand that CUDA's early lead happened due to Nvidia knowing the importance of software, I don't see why ROCm is allegedly a joke based on technical merits).