Mastodawn

problematic trait of mine: i actually like the Linux NVIDIA graphics driver. it's always worked really well for me, it's fast, it's got good compatibility with games i run under wine, it handled render offload, hotplug, and hot-unplug of GPUs (less so the latter but to an extent) about as well as you can do with Xorg

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✧✦Catherine✦✧2d ago

nvidia.ko is one of the most singularly reviled things in the broader Linux sphere, maybe even more so than systemd, and honestly i don't think it deserves that level of hate

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Josh Simmons 2d ago

@whitequark hater opinion: i feel like most of the hate these days is simply because wayland folks refused to work with nvidia and so the wayland desktop was broken for years.

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Pixel Purrito 11h ago

@dotstdy @whitequark well yes and no, NVIDIA were invited to the table, the rest of vendors and community decided on an approach for Wayland that was fine for all of them, then NVIDIA refused to work with the rest and do their own thing instead (EGLStreams, that works only with their driver, is nonstandard, and with many limitations). Then of course because everybody else took the common approach, and they've been playing catchup.

The initial refusal to add proper DRM/KMS modesetting to their driver was what made NVIDIA diverge, and that was way before Wayland, and already then it was clear that this would be the way forward for Linux GPU drivers more than 15 years ago.

“Wayland folks didn't want to work with NVIDIA” is an urban legend.

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Josh Simmons 11h ago

@aperezdc @whitequark it's not possible for nvidia to use drm apis without rewriting their kernel driver as a gpl module. So no. "Wayland" writ large did not consider that a constraint worth designing around.

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Josh Simmons

@aperezdc I don't really think it matters much either way API wise. But Nvidia presented options which were short term achievable with their tech stack, and implemented them, and the response was very negative. Linux wants to use the drm apis as a moat against the thing Nvidia was specifically trying to do, so their only option was to re-architect their driver, and it turns out that's a long painful process, which leads to negative sentiment from people who want their computers to work.