Fedora Project Leader Calls Out NVIDIA Over Their Proprietary Linux Drivers

Fedora Project Leader Matthew Miller took to Twitter on Sunday with a long series of tweets of his personal opinion going after NVIDIA's proprietary driver stack and encouraging the company to be more like Intel and AMD with regards to open-source driver support.

Matthew Miller detailed his opinion on how with Fedora and other Linux that everyone is "building a shared, common good -- something that belongs to all of us" and is crafting a "digital public good". While Intel and AMD back open-source drivers and contribute heavily to upstream Linux components, NVIDIA is the odd man out. He acknowledges Fedora / Red Hat and others have done "a whole bunch of extra bending-over backwards" to improve the NVIDIA proprietary driver Linux experience, but it's less than desirable.

Miller also went on to note "We could make a special thing which detects Nvidia hardware and does kid-glove special handling to hide Nvidia's lack of support. But that *really* hides that we don't have to do that for the others." And that the finite time available to open-source developers could be better spent working on Intel and AMD graphics.

He also went on to call on NVIDIA engineers to contribute to the open-source Nouveau driver, which is rather useless for their modern GPUs due to the lack of re-clocking support and obstacles around signed firmware images. "If you work at Nvidia and happen to see this, maybe you can make a difference. Come on, join us! Work directly on the Nouveau driver so it just works on new hardware. Make it have the best performance possible — you know your own hardware!"

See the Fedora Project Leader's NVIDIA thread over on Twitter.