KWin Maintainer On KDE Wayland Remains Uninterested In NVIDIA's Driver

[bug77]

Let's have dozens of comments saying, "F*** you, NVIDIA" and other inanities which beautifully portray the open source community and its zealotry. Let's forget that NVIDIA owes the open source community basically nothing. Last but not least let's also forget that their OpenGL implementation is basically a standard in the computing industry. Let's just show our hatred because it's what anonymous commentators are perfectly capable of, right?

I don't have a problem with that. Nor am I worried about Nvidia's stance. I'm pretty sure if and when Wayland becomes the de facto standard, they'll have working support for it.

Major parts of NVidia's workstation and HPC GPU business depend on Linux. They leech off the community while not giving back in kind, except in a few areas where they benefit from cooperation.

They wrote the first video driver for Linux that didn't sucked. And they did it before Mesa. Linux would be ruling the desktop world by now if everyone would be leeching off it like Nvidia

[shawnsterp]

I use kde and I use nvidia... But, it does make me wonder a few things that perhaps other ppl here could comment on:

1. How is gnome handling this stuff? Is it the same, or is this an example of kde developers being the smartest ppl in the room (like the csd vs ssd crap)?

2. My guess is my next graphics card will be an amd, but is this really a future show stopper for nvidia users?

As always (and I know I am asking for the moon here), I am hoping for a mature discussion void of the usual nvidia fanboy vs amd fanboy mud-flinging.

EDIT: is it me, or is the Martin kde post down?

[kaprikawn]

....Last but not least let's also forget that their OpenGL implementation is basically a standard in the computing industry....

You really undermine everything else you say in your post when you include this nugget which is factually and objectively wrong.

[andre30correia]

Wayland will die and linux desktop without nvidia support.

[dh04000]

As always (and I know I am asking for the moon here), I am hoping for a mature discussion void of the usual nvidia fanboy vs amd fanboy mud-flinging.

You're not going to find that on Phoronix.

[ArthurBorsboom]

Since I do not expect anything from Nvidia and I do not like the closed source driver part and the problems coming with it, I have ordered an AMD RX580 to solve my problem on my side. What a relief. :-)

[bug77]

I use kde and I use nvidia... But, it does make me wonder a few things that perhaps other ppl here could comment on:

1. How is gnome handling this stuff? Is it the same, or is this an example of kde developers being the smartest ppl in the room (like the csd vs ssd crap)?

2. My guess is my next graphics card will be an amd, but is this really a future show stopper for nvidia users?

As always (and I know I am asking for the moon here), I am hoping for a mature discussion void of the usual nvidia fanboy vs amd fanboy mud-flinging.

EDIT: is it me, or is the Martin kde post down?

1. Gnome went ahead and implemented different code paths for running on Mesa and Nvidia.
2. I don't think this will remain a show stopper. Sure, you can't use Wayland today, but when you look at things that currently don't work on Wayland, you're almost happy you can't To date, there's nothing widespread on Linux desktop Nvidia doesn't support, so I doubt Wayland will be the first to be ignored.

[cl333r]

+1 Couldn't have said it better.

+1 Couldn't comment that comment better.

[Ropid]

I use kde and I use nvidia... But, it does make me wonder a few things that perhaps other ppl here could comment on:

1. How is gnome handling this stuff? Is it the same, or is this an example of kde developers being the smartest ppl in the room (like the csd vs ssd crap)?

2. My guess is my next graphics card will be an amd, but is this really a future show stopper for nvidia users?

As always (and I know I am asking for the moon here), I am hoping for a mature discussion void of the usual nvidia fanboy vs amd fanboy mud-flinging.

EDIT: is it me, or is the Martin kde post down?

About 1): Gnome Wayland does technically work with NVIDIA, but it is in practice useless as "XWayland" does not work with NVIDIA, only native Wayland programs. This means when you start an X program in Gnome Wayland, it will only find the mesa software renderer for OpenGL, not the NVIDIA driver. I think there's no point investing time in getting Plasma/KDE working with Wayland and NVIDIA right now.

About 2): The open-source AMD driver situation seems to be getting pretty close to being able to be a good choice over NVIDIA's driver. There's active, professional work being done to get the VR stuff usable on it, and that's the kind of thing where it's absolutely required that the driver works great. Games need to run at low latency and smooth because you will get physically sick in VR otherwise.

I think this might actually be a problem for NVIDIA. If game developers start developing and testing with AMD cards instead of on NVIDIA cards, you then get a reversed situation compared to how things were until now. You'll get weird problems in games with NVIDIA instead of with AMD, and then AMD is clearly the best choice when buying a new card. The different desktop environments are all already in that situation for a pretty long while as you might have noticed, where the developers work with open-source drivers on their own machines and release updates that have weird problems for NVIDIA users.

[chithanh]

They wrote the first video driver for Linux that didn't sucked. And they did it before Mesa. Linux would be ruling the desktop world by now if everyone would be leeching off it like Nvidia

This is not FreeBSD we are talking about.

At no point in time did a significant share of Linux systems use the proprietary NVidia driver, not in the early years when it mostly ran on desktops, not later when Linux mostly ran on servers, and not today where the vast majority of Linux systems are embedded/smartphones.

And the contribution to improving desktop Linux? Almost none, they kept the code to themselves with few exceptions (e.g. libvdpau, which is abandoned now). Only marketshare.