Rumor: NVIDIA Working On Their Own Distribution For Linux Gamers

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Rumor: NVIDIA Working On Their Own Distribution For Linux Gamers

Making the rounds on the Internet today is a rumor that NVIDIA Corp is allegedly working on their own Linux distribution...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-NLinux-Distro-Rumor

[torsionbar28]

"It's also not a problem of NVIDIA's proprietary Linux driver being hard to install... If anything, it would be more interesting for AMD/RTG to come out with an experimental/enthusiast distribution (or more ideally, a PPA/Copr/OBS/third-party-repository for Ubuntu/Fedora/etc) with all of their bleeding-edge driver components throughout the kernel/user-space stack plus all of their other open-source components from GPUOpen, etc. But on the NVIDIA side, with being just a bundled binary blob, it's own distribution really isn't needed. "

Agreed, we really don't need yet another niche distribution. How many people have a dedicated Linux gaming desktop? Not many. Most likely have a Linux desktop used for general computing, which they'd also like to play games on.

It would be great if they used a rock solid stable distro with a long support cycle, like CentOS, and then simply made available a repo with all the required gaming bits. They could even provide an alternate kernel that could install alongside the CentOS kernel, similar to El Repo.

[schmidtbag]

This is definitely weird, though in retrospect, it isn't that surprising. Nvidia is notorious for stubbornly doing things their own way regardless of what everyone else wants. Tthe Linux community has always pressured nvidia to do things "the Linux way", where if they did it would make life easy for everyone (except maybe nvidia?). But, since Linux is open source but nvidia's software isn't, to me, it makes sense that nvidia can create their own distro and customize it to work entirely the way they think is best. And honestly, it might turn out pretty good. If they do custom kernels, it could really have a significant performance boost.

[chuckula]

I could see an Nvidia distribution as being an excellent reference platform for any other distribution that wants to provide strong graphics performance and support. The actual Nvidia distribution doesn't need a huge individual userbase, but it can serve as a template for everyone else to improve their settings so that the graphics work as smoothly as possible.

[leiptrstormr]

There are plenty of GPGPU programs as well as Steam Nvidia could tweak to get the best performance. It's no weirder than Intel having their own distribution.

[Pecisk]

Sounds like more reference system for testing Nvidia on Linux to me.

[andre30correia]

look like a system for testing their drivers, nothing more

[Pecisk]

But fact they actually using freedom Linux distribution licensing allows them to speaks volumes. If it is really a reference system, it is really bright move from Nvidia QA and dev relationship. Just ship prepackaged Debian 8 with latest driver so devs can copy project, hit run and be done with. No need to install whatnot distribution and worry about updating it.

[wodencafe]

I could see an Nvidia distribution as being an excellent reference platform for any other distribution that wants to provide strong graphics performance and support. The actual Nvidia distribution doesn't need a huge individual userbase, but it can serve as a template for everyone else to improve their settings so that the graphics work as smoothly as possible.

Seconded.

[sarmad]

It's likely for developers as Michael suggested. I really don't want to see another distro for gaming.