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

[newwen]

I currently use an NVIDIA card because of CUDA and Tensorflow.

As soon as AMD's software ecosystem ROCm and ML frameworks start supporting it, I'll switch to an AMD Vega card.

NVIDIA's attitude towards Linux, forcing the community to support them instead of working with the community, has led me to say F**k you to Nvidia. I can get that the EGLStream API suits them better, and I believed in their efforts to work on a new API that would replace EGLStreams and GBM. But I see no progress, and it seems that Nvidia has lost the sense of urgency once Red Hat added support for their proprietary API in Mutter, which should be only a stopgap solution. They definitely lost me when they announced that they had no plans to support Xwayland. Wine, as well as most games and proprietary apps do not support Wayland and run only under XWayland. I doubt that they many ever will, so no acceleration for those, ever. Using Nvidia under Wayland is thus not an option.

They can get away with their binary driver, but not supporting Wayland/Xwayland is totally a f**k you, Nvidia.

[newwen]

Until XWayland supports the NVidia driver, it's pointless for compositors to add in EGLStreams support. So you can talk about Martin setting himself on fire if you want, but the entire building he's in is already consumed by flames. In another year, if the xwayland support comes, then I'd bet he might be willing to reconsider his position - or the new shared api might be closer to reality at that point. But for the moment, there's zero reason to work on this.

Don't hold your breath. Nvidia has said they don't plan to support XWayland, so only software OpenGL rendering will be available for applications runing under XWayland. This means that Wayland desktops are not going to be usable under Nvidia for the foreseeable future, as games and many apps that need HW acceleration won't be updated to run natively under wayland. This means that either Nvidia forces us to use the Xorg sessions instead of Wayland, or we show them the middle finger and buy AMD cards.

[labyrinth153]

Metal isn’t popular outside apple. Literally 2000x the install base of any Linux. Next.

[DanL]

Metal isn’t popular outside apple. Literally 2000x the install base of any Linux. Next.

Have fun with your Apple tax. Next.

[labyrinth153]

Gee. Free os, free updates. Professional tech support. I think I am set for the next half decade.

[RussianNeuroMancer]

When people complain to me about the lack of Nvidia support in Sway, I get really pissed off. It is not my fucking problem to support Nvidia, it’s Nvidia’s fucking problem to support me. Even Broadcom, fucking Broadcom, supports the appropriate kernel APIs. And proprietary driver users have the gall to reward Nvidia for their behavior by giving them hundreds of dollars for their GPUs, then come to me and ask me to deal with their bullshit for free. Well, fuck you, too. Nvidia users are shitty consumers and I don’t even want them in my userbase. Choose hardware that supports your software, not the other way around.

Buy AMD. Nvidia– fuck you!

(c) https://drewdevault.com/2017/10/26/Fuck-you-nvidia.html

[Khrundel]

Don't hold your breath. Nvidia has said they don't plan to support XWayland, so only software OpenGL rendering will be available for applications runing under XWayland.

Haven't checked myself, but I've heard there is a problem with GLX, while modern games don't use it directly. They work through SDL library, so you can export one environment variable (and mmaybe, LD_PRELOAD wayland-supported SDL) to switch from xwayland+glx to wayland+egl.

[Khrundel]

(c) https://drewdevault.com/2017/10/26/Fuck-you-nvidia.html

Funniest thing in these texts is "everybody else use GBM". Who are these "everybody"? The only "everybody" that counts is AMD. And they've got hiperf driver which works well with Wayland, OpenGL and Vulkan couple of months ago. If somebody wants sway/plasma on wayland and sees Intel or Broadcom as good enough solutions, well, he can use nouveau and reboot to windows to play.

[birdie]

I've always suspected that many Linux zealots live in an illusory world but I'm still curious how you manage to survive in the real world.

What I told was not an opinion. That was a fact based on hard Steam statistics. People who actually play use NVIDIA and, obviously, game developers cannot disregard their choice. People who throw shit at one another at Phoronix forums either don't game or don't have a discrete GPU at all. I know facts and logic are hard to swallow but you could try it for a change.

[srakitnican]

Well I am using only Intel for the same very reason that GPU drivers is/was a mess. I want out of the box experience and long term support. For that same reason I am not even considering Nvidia. Proprietary way of doing it is simply not working out for Linux if you don't want to trow your hardware away after official support ends.