Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Changes Default For NVIDIA Driver Back To Using X.Org Rather Than Wayland

[mdedetrich]

Well, nVidia had plenty of opportunity, what with KWin devs sending the EGLStreams guy to go talk to the driver guys.



That's beside the point. I'm arguing against your "(which btw EGLStreams is an open standard, check Kronos group).", argument from authority.

Suppose Khronos accepted My Immortal as some kind of standard. That wouldn't change the fact that it's one of the most famous bad fanfics of all time.

Sure, but even that point about argument about authority is missing full context because EGLStreams wasn't just poppoed out of nowhere from NVidia's behind. It was actually based off Android's graphics stack at the time, which used explicit sync and was actually the most widely used Linux based graphics stack, and still is (and this was a graphics stack being used on phones where performance/battery usage is even more critical).

In any case this hypothetical of NVidia should have "contributed the linux way" to the graphics stack in the past is complete hogwash. Look at this way, even now there is pushback against explicit sync from within linux graphics stack developers (as evidenced earlier). What in your right mind would make you think that NVidia would have had any chance whatsoever 10 years ago? It would have been a completely fruitless exercise and likely would have just exacerbated the tensions between NVidia and the OS community even more (and I wouldn't be surprised if this was the main reason why NVidia just used the "hands off and lets wait approach").

At that point in time no one was getting anywhere on this topic, let alone NVidia and James Jones alluded to this on gitlab's mesa, i.e.

Explicit sync everywhere. Of course, it would help if our driver supported sync FD first. Working on that one. Then, X devs would need to relent and let the present extension support sync FD or similar. I'm not clear why there has been so much pushback there. Present was always designed to support explicit sync, it just unfortunately predated sync FD by a few months. glamor would also need to use explicit sync for internal rendering. I believe it has some code for this, but it uses shmfence IIRC, which in turn relies on implicit sync.

Agreed that's just for our driver stack, and we are indeed working on patches to add the necessary support to X. We've only been wary of this because similar proposals have died in review before because there didn't seem to be sufficient resolve to close on some of the interaction issues, unless there was other offline conversation not reflected on-list:

Basically back then the Linux graphics developers dug their heels so hard in the "implicit sync is right" camp (mainly because it nicely fit the Linux/Unix mantra of everything is a file or a process) that they refused to budge on anything regardless of who it came from. We only started making progress on this like 3 years ago and thats mainly thanks to Jason Ekstrand.

[wertigon]

Yeah and the problem is its an outdated design using old concepts that would have forced NVidia to recode their drivers because they dropped those old concepts decades ago. Just because its a standard or its in Linux doesn't automatically mean it should be followed.

Again point is that NVidia has standards and holding the fort/being dogmatic in the ways that typical Linux devs are only works when you happen to be technically correct which doesn't always happen.

It does not matter that Nvidia believes they have a superior technical solution. The reality is, a consumer and/or system integrator can choose between a hardware with great driver support or a hardware with decent driver support.

Guess which ones Chromebooks choose? What about System76? Dell? Valve? Lenovo? List goes on. As more SIs offer Linux based offerings, the hardware support will matter more and more.

Nvidia is free to delude themselves thinking that the desktop doesn't matter. But fact of the matter is, an AMD laptop with AMD graphics is a superior experience to Nvidia laptop, despite having the inferior render path.

Feel free to keep deluding yourself that render path is everything. It isn't, it is only a small piece of the puzzle, and if the end user need to jump through 15 hoops to get better render performance for no better reason than Nvidia being stubborn about it, let's see how long that market share lasts.

Like I said, your move Nvidia. Downgrade or bleed market share, which one is it gonna be?

[mangeek]

Pounds of CO₂ emitted per million British thermal units (Btu) of energy for various fuels

Coal (anthracite)	228.60
Coal (bituminous)	205.40
Coal (lignite)	216.24
Coal (subbituminous)	214.13
Diesel fuel and heating oil	163.45
Gasoline (without ethanol)	155.77
Propane	138.63
Natural gas	116.65

Basically, using gasoline and internal combustion engines is more environmental friendly than EVs and coal plants. And since it's basically established science that gasoline and internal combustion engines are bad for the environment, replacing them with EVs powered by coal that's 50-200% more dirty no matter how you fudge the numbers is clearly not the correct solution.

Using green vehicles without creating green energy first is like putting a fresh coat of paint over black mold spores. You didn't fix anything; you just hid the problem from view.

Consider that *my* electricity (New England) comes almost entirely from natural gas, nuclear, and hydroelectric, not coal. Also consider that the efficiency of a power plant vs an individual ICE is very different, enough to overcome transmission and storage losses on the EV side. An EV run entirely off coal electricity likely pollutes less than a gas engine over its lifetime because the power plant is converting more of the coal->heat reaction to power than cars can convert gas->motion.

[mdedetrich]

It does not matter that Nvidia believes they have a superior technical solution. The reality is, a consumer and/or system integrator can choose between a hardware with great driver support or a hardware with decent driver support.

Guess which ones Chromebooks choose? What about System76? Dell? Valve? Lenovo? List goes on. As more SIs offer Linux based offerings, the hardware support will matter more and more.

Nvidia is free to delude themselves thinking that the desktop doesn't matter. But fact of the matter is, an AMD laptop with AMD graphics is a superior experience to Nvidia laptop, despite having the inferior render path.

Feel free to keep deluding yourself that render path is everything. It isn't, it is only a small piece of the puzzle, and if the end user need to jump through 15 hoops to get better render performance for no better reason than Nvidia being stubborn about it, let's see how long that market share lasts.

Like I said, your move Nvidia. Downgrade or bleed market share, which one is it gonna be?

You are making a mountain of a molehill. The current state is this, if you are a distribution and the machine has an NVidia graphics card just use XOrg until Wayland is ready, its not hard. Even using Wayland by default for non NVidia graphics cards right now is quite controversial considering things such as VNC are completely broken in Wayland (at least with latest Ubuntu stable 21.04 for example).

Even steam deck (which I personally own) does not use Wayland, it uses Xorg (I verified this by switching the steam deck into desktop mode and running Linux commands).

If distributions switch default to Wayland when its clearly not usable, at least if those distros care about usability then I am sorry but they are a shitty distro. The main one I personally use (Manjaro) hasn't switched to Wayland (including non NVidia) for exactly this reason, its simply not ready yet.

Also regarding the comment about your hardware, have you heard of NVidia shield or Nintendo Switch. I am pretty sure that NVidia doesn't have any problems in this segment . NVidia just doesn't like going for the ultra low cost market that is dominated by things like Chromebooks, there isn't a lot of profit there. And if you are talking about general system integrator's, I am sorry to burst your bubble but they don't give a flying f**k about what you are complaining about.

[skeevy420]

Consider that *my* electricity (New England) comes almost entirely from natural gas, nuclear, and hydroelectric, not coal. Also consider that the efficiency of a power plant vs an individual ICE is very different, enough to overcome transmission and storage losses on the EV side. An EV run entirely off coal electricity likely pollutes less than a gas engine over its lifetime because the power plant is converting more of the coal->heat reaction to power than cars can convert gas->motion.

I can't argue with any of that, but, still, the majority of power in America (and the world) comes from burning fossil fuels. Switching from an Internal Combustion Engine to an External Combustion Engine doesn't change the burning of fossil fuels to power a Combustion Engine.

Yes, a fossil fuel based power plant is an External Combustion Engine. It may even be a more efficient Combustion Engine, but it still massively pollutes the air because it's a Big Ass Combustion Engine.

My power is mostly coal. This is my state's info:

Annual Energy Production
Electric Power Generation:65 TWh (2% total U.S.)
Coal:28.4 TWh, 44% [5.5GW totalcapacity]
Petroleum:0TWh, 0% [0GW total capacity]
Natural Gas:17.1 TWh, 26% [8.9GW total capacity]
Nuclear:15.5 TWh, 24% [1.8GW total capacity]
Hydro:2.2 TWh, 3% [1.3GW total capacity]
Other Renewable:0TWh, <1% [0.4GW total capacity]

As you can see, The Natural State isn't very naturally powered.

Fucked up thing is they could build a geothermal power plant where I live in Hot Springs. Ain't hard to build either. Just a closed loop system. Send water down, earth boils it, sends up steam, steam powers turbines, steam liquefies, process repeats. Once built all you'd need is maintenance people for upkeep and repairs and you'd get constant free electricity.

But that's too simple. Drill, baby, drill.

[wertigon]

--- A bunch of baloney justification drivel ---

Look man, it's perfectly simple.

Get an AMD laptop. Install Linux on it. Play around with it. Understand what leaps have been made the last couple of years, especially in respect to user experience. Then get an Intel laptop and do the same thing there. Then go to an AMD+Nvidia or Intel+Nvidia laptop. That experience leaves a lot to be desired.

Is the AMD / Intel laptop a bug free experience? No. Is the experience objectively speaking a hell of a lot better than Nivida? Why, yes! Yes it is. And getting better by every new Distro release.

It's the Betamax vs VHS debate all over again. You sure Nvidia want to keep being stubborn about it?

[mdedetrich]

Look man, it's perfectly simple.

Get an AMD laptop. Install Linux on it. Play around with it. Understand what leaps have been made the last couple of years, especially in respect to user experience. Then get an Intel laptop and do the same thing there. Then go to an AMD+Nvidia or Intel+Nvidia laptop. That experience leaves a lot to be desired.

Is the AMD / Intel laptop a bug free experience? No. Is the experience objectively speaking a hell of a lot better than Nivida? Why, yes! Yes it is. And getting better by every new Distro release.

It's the Betamax vs VHS debate all over again. You sure Nvidia want to keep being stubborn about it?

I have all 3 laptops (amd with integrated graphics, intel with iGPU) and an Intel laptop with NVidia discrete graphics (quadro actually). With Manjaro distribution which set up optimus prime I had no real problems with it. It seems like unlike other people on Phoronix, I don't make my own problems. I also have a desktop with an Intel graphics card and 1080Ti, again works fine.

So yes, its perfectly simple, if you have an NVidia card use X11 and a non shit distribution that knows how to set it up (after all that is the job of a distro). And if you are wondering, I do classify Ubuntu as a shit distribution (in this regards) because evidently they don't care about usability and they break things all the time, i.e. VNC for latest version of Ubuntu stable (21.04) which has Wayland as default for non NVidia machines is completely broken (and I know this because I am currently using it and I will end up having to change it to X11)

Case closed.

[wertigon]

[...] Manjaro [...] X11 [...]

Try out of box behavior on stock Ubuntu or Fedora instead, the tearing on Xorg is horrible, Wayland on the other hand has no problem what so ever - except on Nvidia of course. This is what I see as an end user. So from this end user perspective, AMD and Intel got it right, Nvidia got it wrong, so therefore this end user will keep buying AMD products in the future, while skipping over the Nvidia stuff.

95% performance is good enough if it means I do not need to jump through hoops. My time > better gaming performance.

[mdedetrich]

Try out of box behavior on stock Ubuntu or Fedora instead, the tearing on Xorg is horrible, Wayland on the other hand has no problem what so ever - except on Nvidia of course. This is what I see as an end user. So from this end user perspective, AMD and Intel got it right, Nvidia got it wrong, so therefore this end user will keep buying AMD products in the future, while skipping over the Nvidia stuff.

95% performance is good enough if it means I do not need to jump through hoops. My time > better gaming performance.

lol, our company uses Fedora as a default distro for their laptops and they have plenty of issues with Fedora + Wayland trust me (so much so developers who are primarily Linux enthusiasts are going for Mac M1's....)

And yeah, stock Ubuntu with Wayland has completely broken VNC as I have said before.

Also not sure what you are going on about wrt screen tearing, no problems on my NVidia machine there.

[mppix]

Pounds of CO₂ emitted per million British thermal units (Btu) of energy for various fuels

Coal (anthracite)	228.60
Coal (bituminous)	205.40
Coal (lignite)	216.24
Coal (subbituminous)	214.13
Diesel fuel and heating oil	163.45
Gasoline (without ethanol)	155.77
Propane	138.63
Natural gas	116.65

Basically, using gasoline and internal combustion engines is more environmental friendly than EVs and coal plants. And since it's basically established science that gasoline and internal combustion engines are bad for the environment, replacing them with EVs powered by coal that's 50-200% more dirty no matter how you fudge the numbers is clearly not the correct solution.

Using green vehicles without creating green energy first is like putting a fresh coat of paint over black mold spores. You didn't fix anything; you just hid the problem from view.

I just saw this so this is for the record:
(1) Electricity is produce by a mix of energy sources. Coal has a fraction that varies a lot by country (20-30% coal is a dirty energy mix)
(2) The energy mix of most countries is getting cleaner year over year
(3) EV would still be cleaner or at leas competitive (assuming it only runs on electricity produced by coal) because peak efficiency of an electric motor is ~95% and that of an engine is 20-35%, so EV are 3-4 times more efficient
(4) The efficiency curve of electric motors is flat; engines only have a narrow peak. Therefore, ICE car often achieve <10% efficiency in city diving while an EV can achieve 80-90%.
(5) Even ignoring everything else, cars are where people are, power plants are not.

In short, whoever came up with the above post is a moron and is paid directly or indirectly by a coal or oil company for his/her selective view (that needs to distort reality on multiple levels to be true).