>The last issue could be solved with a reusable library that provided basic compositor functionality for window managers.

This is pretty much what wlroots is.

Say I wanted to roll up my sleeves and implement NVIDIA's proprietary interface myself. (Or say in a few years we come up with some new, even better way to allocate buffers or whatever.) On X, I can write a compositor that uses that interface, and it'll work with basically every window manager written since the early 90's.

On Wayland, I could patch wlroots, but then I'll only be able to use window managers based on wlroots. If I want to use a different window manager, I'll need to patch a different library. And depending on how stable wlroots's interface is, I might need to maintain patches for old versions of it depending on how maintained my preferred window managers are.

The Wayland situation is probably fine if you only ever want to use the latest version of the most popular two or three desktop environments. But speaking personally, if I wanted to do that, I'd just run macOS.

The only successful one, to be clear. You would be unwise to base your compositor on any of the others (libweston, wlc, swc, etc). wlroots is suitable for basically any use-case.

Except the single largest GPU vendor, yes.

However, there are more reasons than political not to "support" Nvidia. Their alternative has genuine technical problems that would render large parts of wlroots broken.

If this is indeed true (and I have no reason to doubt you) then I wish you and the rest of the Sway folks would focus on those issues, instead of the political arguments because from the outside it all looks very petty when you write stuff like "Nvidia doesn't support Sway". Nvidia doesn't even know about you.

Most of the discussion I've read online argues that to support NVIDIA's solution, everyone would need to add if(nvidia) checks to their code and maintain them forever. But this argument only really holds in Wayland's bizarro-world where all programs that arrange windows must also bake in code that interfaces directly with hardware to draw them on the screen.

Absent any other technical problems, it's hard not to conclude that this is just an attempt to use politics to cover up one of Wayland's poor design choices.

This is a severe misunderstanding of NVIDIA's solution.

NVIDIA's solutions is so fundamentally different that you'd basically maintain two compositors internally: One that handles every sane driver, and one that handles NVIDIA.

Nothing in wayland is incompatible with NVIDIA's approach. GNOME supports it, and KDE recently gained support. However, the NVIDIA approach exists for only one reason: Because NVIDIA does not want to play along with the open source world, and doing the least amount of work to their proprietary driver.

Unless NVIDIA turns their ship around, supporting NVIDIA is harmful to our community. Although, if they'd just keep up with our standardized APIs, maybe we could somehow accept their ridiculous proprietary drivers which has no place in this decade.

If Wayland had a standard compositor interface like X has, this wouldn't be a problem at all, would it? You could write your compositor that talks to the hardware using your "sane" interface, and someone else could write a compositor that uses the NVIDIA interface, and users could pick the compositor that works for them and use it with any window manager they choose.

It's only because of Wayland's design that "GPU manufacturer creates nonstandard interface to their driver" is some giant, existential, ecosystem-fragmenting threat to the open-source community.

Hardware definitely needs drivers, but these days the Linux community has settled on the model that all drivers should live in the Linux kernel, where they can share common code like "talking to the PCI bus" and security infrastructure. What you're proposing is that, instead of having one driver layer from "standard API" to "hardware interface", there should be multiple redundant driver layers, so that NVIDIA can implement whichever layer optimally balances their desire to support customers with their desire to hide their intellectual property.

That's not a crazy position (NVIDIA certainly holds it, and they're no small fry!) but telling Libre graphics-stack people "you need to make your architecture more complex and do extra work for free, to make this multi-billion-dollar company feel more comfortable" is always going to be a difficult proposition.

That's not how I think of it. By analogy, consider POSIX. Every major operating system supports the POSIX interface--all of them, except one that is. But no one goes around calling that one OS a "giant, existential, ecosystem-fragmenting threat to the open-source community."

Essentially, you have to pick a point somewhere in the stack where you define the common interface between the different hardware vendors. The problem is that one hardware vendor, because it's the 800 lb. gorilla who loves throwing its weight around, decided to not implement the common interface, hoping that its weight will force everyone else to adapt. Wayland is unfortunate enough to be in a position where it relies on that common interface being supported, but this isn't the only place that NVidia has decided to try to scuttle cross-vendor compatibility (GPGPU computing is a very notorious case).

we did do that, and they were, but for the most part, for the moment (at least) we've won - so it's no longer on the tip of our tongue

"POSIX Has Become Outdated"

https://www.usenix.org/system/files/login/issues/login_fall1...

So no, Windows isn't the only one that doesn't care.

It does. It's called Wayland.

I suspect you might instead be thinking of a standard window manager interface to plug into a compositor, rather than the other way around.

The Wayland approach has been to just make it easier to write a compositor, instead of porting X's complexities and odd design choices.

However, nothing stops you from making a compositor with such an interface. It won't be part of Wayland, but it would be its own spec.

However, this suggestion would be a case of symptomatic treatment. The root cause of complexity is NVIDIA.

> It's only because of Wayland's design

This is not true. It just because Wayland is not X, and NVIDIA only has support for X.

Under X, every driver had its own integration, which was a pain to make, maintain and use.

For Wayland, the community got together to make a generic API that had nothing to do with Wayland, allowing applications (be it a wayland compositor or something else) to not have to think about what they're running on.

NVIDIA, however, is just trying to throw more duct-tape, taking us back to the X era.

You may ask "Why don't everyone just implement EGLStream?" - that is because EGLStream has no merit, and is just the implementation that would be easiest for NVIDIA to implement. Why would we make everything else worse, spending significant time and effort redesigning everything else, all to save NVIDIA a few bucks?

If they have actual concerns, we can solve it as a community, but considering that everyone invested significant time in this project, we are not going to throw it all away and pick a vastly inferior model just so that NVIDIA doesn't have to do anything. NVIDIA is just one GPU manufacturer out of many, and on Linux, a small one.

As for EGLStream problems: Performance and stability are the big ones. Ironically, EGLStream is bad for gaming, as we cannot do direct scanout with it (an optimization where full-screen content gets thrown directly to screen instead of going through compositing).

Is there a list of ranking anywhere?

I vaguely have an idea of probably Intel is first then AMD second.

However, they mostly refuse to play ball. They did seem to be preparing an alternative suggestion, but they seem to have dropped it entirely in favor of just dumping EGLStream patches on KDE and GNOME, hoping every one else will be forced to follow.

EGLStreams works by having children pass ownership of the surface they want to display to their parent for compositing. This invalidates said surface.

GBM is a coherent model. Handles are passed around to prevent the need for copying, but ownership isn’t transferred.

Nvidia’s driver is a black box, but I don’t think they can do things that way without some significant driver refactoring. Obviously that’s costly, so they’re trying to avoid doing it.

AMD took a gamble when they began their open source initiative. It’s starting to pay off now with stuff like Stadia and the Valve stuff. I feel like Nvidia is going to have to do an open driver eventually. I hope they’ve got at least something in the works that we don’t know about.

I’m not going to suggest replacing Nvidia cards if they’re working fine for what you do. Just look at AMD (or Intel next year) if you start hunting for your next card. Don’t fall into the brand loyalty pit.

At the end of the day, X, GNOME and KDE have all figured out how to work with NVIDIA binary drivers, but wlroots has not.

(I don't know how much NVIDIA has contributed to GNOME and KDE's Wayland compositors)

If Nvidia don't support it, how much of a useful standard can it really be?

(In principle GBM isn't quite a single-implementation Mesa only standard - third party implementations are possible, though the only one that exists right now is by ARM for their newer Mali GPUs. People seem to have had mixed results with it and I'm not sure it's even intended to run desktop Wayland.)

FreeBSD 12.0 has Linux DRM 4.16 code (April 2018), while -current has Linux DRM 5.0 code (March 2019).

OpenBSD -current (next release) has Linux 4.19 DRM code (October 2018, LTS), with initial AMDGPU backports from 4.20 (AMD Picasso & Raven 2 support).

Adding that their proprietary drivers are not particularly good, NVIDIA is not a very popular choice for a Linux machine.

Just remember that it took them almost a decade to add KMS support.

You could vote with your wallet but there aren't enough Linux users to move anyone's needles as far as gpus.

Well, for server and ML payloads, we are the vast majority. Things like Google Stadia is certainly enough to move needles, and if AMD ends up able to compete in ML with future products, then we'd be able to make a huge dent in NVIDIA revenue.

GBM works just fine, they've simply chosen not to support it.

Or perhaps their marvelous installation methods of running a random script as root that rewrites configuration files, and its configuration interface that likewise also rewrites configuration files in attempts to get multi-monitor setups working that until recently hardly ever worked?

Maybe you are referring to their magnificent support, forcing you to stay on outdated kernels as upgrading would break compatibility and render you without a functioning graphics adapter short of a VGA-resolution framebuffer console?

It could also be their fantastic backwards compatibility, requiring you to keep track of driver series compatible with certain adapters, where every other GPU in existence just works OOB.

I used NVIDIA up until a 2 years back. While you could arguably get things to work, claiming they had excellent support is laughable at best.

Furthermore lag time for supporting newest kernel normally lags what 30 days?

In brief what you are describing is self inflicted wounds.

Doing what everyone else does != doing it properly

> I wouldn't call this excellent at all

So far Wayland support is most further in Gnome and even there a lot of features are still missing/broken despite Wayland being well over a decade old at this point. A lot of very basic features (remote desktop, screen sharing, exclusive fullscreen, keyboard/mouse shortcuts) are still in their infancy. Not to mention both Gnome and KDE have implemented their Wayland compositor inside the shell process so now a compositor crash means you lose all your open apps which hasn't been a problem in Linux for decades.

- remote desktop: good point. Considering that screen recordings work fine, I don't see a technical reason that a Wayland remote desktop setup couldn't work.

- exclusive fullscreen: what do you mean by this? Using Firefox, F11 and Super-F both work in Sway and F11 works with GNOME.

- keyboard/mouse shortcuts: maybe? The fact that a random process can no longer read all of your keystrokes seems like a plus, to me. Otherwise, just add a shortcut to your window manager or DE and run a command of your choice.

- losing all apps on compositor restart: Only an issue with GNOME and KDE. Pressing Super-Shift-C on Sway reloads the compositor and not your apps.

It is a plus, unless you write software that allows for global keyboard/mouse shortcuts (which I have done). In which case it is just a huge pain in the ass to not have it, and then hearing from some developers that you can just "add a shortcut to your window manager" is incredibly frustrating. It's not like you can trust an average end-user to actually do so, even the ones that do run linux. Then you will get complained at for not having functionality that existed at some point in the past.

Wayland and its current limitations have nothing to do with, and does not excuse neither, nvidia's non-compliant implementation.

And Xorg supported them for decades before using Xinerama. Instead of collaborating with upstream, they just dumped something incompatible and broken, and said "Deal with it".

Anyone can come up with a standard in isolation. Getting the relevant people on board and able and willing to support it is the useful bit.

Did they say they'd support it? If they never said they did it seems unfair to criticise. Are you going to support my graphics standard that I just made up?

Except gaming is not that "niche":

1.35 billion PCs worldwide - https://www.statista.com/statistics/610271/worldwide-persona...

47M active daily and 90M monthly users for steam https://www.pcgamer.com/steam-now-has-90-million-monthly-use...

You can think of any number of fantasy scenarios that would make one of the biggest GPU vendors care about your standards, but sadly that is not the world we live in. The world we live in is one where Nvidia has the best game support on the market (far, far better than AMD - let's not even think about Intel here) and therefore anyone who still plays games on a PC will own one of them unless they are some sort of AMD advocate.

At the end of the day, nobody wants to be reading "we don't support this because they're not nice to us". That's going straight back to the linux dark ages of 15 years ago, where you needed to care about all sorts of weird and arcane details to get a functioning desktop system.

They aren't pretending they support Linux, BSD, Solaris, Mac, Windows for a decade after each card is released.

While this was true ATI/amd were shipping garbage that barely worked for a few years. This has only changed in recent years.

We are a few years having one dedicated gpu maker in the fold and are already talking about using your massive 2% marketshare to strong arm the other. You could afford to be more humble and less entitled.

I'm just observing that Redhat is the trendsetter and if they say X is legacy, that makes it so. Unless Nvidia or Nvidia customers decide to pick up where Redhat is leaving off and pay for developers to work on X, but I sincerely doubt that's going to happen.

Unless Nvidia decides to support the new system, they can't plausibly claim to support the linux desktop. I just hope whatever happens will result in less online whining from linux-using Nvidia customers.

If nobody picks up the slack, the paths ahead seems pretty clear. Either Nvidia produces a proper driver, or their support for the Linux desktop can be classified as legacy at best. Feeling upset about this situation doesn't change the nature of it.

It doesn't matter who the ones "suffering" are. What do you expect to do, convince me of the moral necessity of supporting nvidia cards so that I turn back time and devote my life to reverse engineering GPUs and implementing FOSS drivers? That can't happen. I don't have the power to support nvidia cards, only Nvidia has that power, and they seem to have no interest in exercising it. It doesn't matter if you convince me that nvidia card support is more important that curing child cancer; the situation remains unchanged. To change the situation you must convince nvidia, complaining to anybody else about it is a waste of your time.

The solution has been presented, and they reject it.

The only people who suffer are the people we write software for. Maybe that doesn't matter to you, because you write software only for people like you. That's fair. It matters to me though.

This is leaving aside all of the trouble that you have with running Nvidia's ML stuff when you don't use their own driver (impossible, AFAICT).

Both of those things are blocking issues for me, which in turn means that using anything that doesn't support regular nvidia drivers is a no go.

1. Relations with NvidiaNVIDIA changes prevent us from releasing a driver

  * Signed firmwares accessible publicly but not redistributable

  * Reverse engineering of vbios impossible

  * Main contact/dev left NVIDIA (Alexandre Courbot)

  * Most important requests left unanswered...

  * ... until more complete code than wanted lands publicly innvgpuweeks later

Or even better, just open source their own driver

Actually the opposite is true.

Recently everyone is converging on re-using the same compositor library, written by among others sway’s author: wlroots.

https://github.com/swaywm/wlroots

(This is on amdgpu and later intel. I had a lot of problems with nouveau.)

AMD was worse, the Linux driver had like half the performance of the Windows one. So if you were asking who has better Linux drivers for Linux the answer was NVIDIA (for desktops not latops)

Over time, a lot of useful stuff was broken and supported less and less, then reimplemented in bad way over compositors, instead of having composting Xserver like Xsgi.

Security extensions or even basic security tools (private input grab) got waylaid because toolkits didn't implement them (try running GTK3 on hardware without 32bit color GL or on system that defaults to lower bit depth than 32/24).

Generally, after letting it get more and more broken, the suggestion for big rewrite arrived. Said suggestion often results in something that resembles "devs first graphic stack", with a lot of basic, important features for daily life relegated to "someone will make an extension for it later" or "use D-bus to implement it elsewhere, and who cares about compatibility".

A bit like IRIS GL never getting open sourced, because it wouldn't be of much use without matching hardware exposed over /dev/GL interface.

Now we've reached the point where there are almost two parallel stacks - linux's graphics infrastructure; and Nvidia's. The developers don't have any patience for the one holdout against the new system. It is unfortunate for the people buying Nvidia cards because they are now starting to be labeled as 'using the legacy systems'. Presumably there is some reason why they have no choice in their purchases, but the cost of maintaining systems to work with closed source drivers appears to be too high. My views here aren't exactly current - I've stayed a long way away from Nvidia since ~2009 - but they are probably sill somewhat on target.

It is likely that a better designed alternative to Wayland will crop up. It is much easier to compete with than X - there are no drivers that only support Wayland.

I would have slightly preferred AMD, but I wanted an i9 in a laptop that had good Linux support, and so nVidia was all I could get (XPS15).

nVidia needs to choose to support Wayland, not Redhat.

I believe the goal of wlroots is to solve this problem:

> wlroots provides backends that abstract the underlying display and input hardware

https://github.com/swaywm/wlroots

Details here: https://drewdevault.com/2017/10/26/Fuck-you-nvidia.html

> About a year ago Nvidia announced “Wayland support” for their proprietary driver. This included KMS and DRM support (years late, I might add), but not GBM support. They shipped something called EGLStreams instead, a concept that had been discussed and shot down by the Linux graphics development community before.

That’s pretty damning for Nvidia. I can see why the developer is so upset. Must be tough working on OSS in that type of hardware environment.

Looks like AMD is the way to go for desktop Linux boxes going forward. Although it looks like both Dell XPS [1] and System76 [2] is still using NVIDIA. Purism Librem uses the Intel i7’s embedded GPU [3]. I’m curious what the ideal Linux laptop is these days…

[1] https://www.dell.com/en-ca/work/shop/cty/pdp/spd/xps-15-9570...

[2] https://system76.com/cart/configure/oryp5

[3] https://shop.puri.sm/shop/librem-15/

Sadly my work uses all Macbrook Pros, which are amazing machines), but I'm scared to install Archlinux on them. The Archlinux Macbook wiki pages are 4yrs+ old.

IMO the ideal GPU for a UHD screen would be either an Iris or a Vega 10. But it's difficult to find the former outside MacBooks and the latter with more than an FHD screen.

Just to back this up, I've recently bought a non-touchbar 13" MBP from 2016, and been amazed at the amount of games I've been able to play no issues on the Intel graphics in it.

Gaming on Linux was vaguely toleable while it lasted but I'm back to Windows.

Problem is: desktop Linux has an irrelevant market share, and the trivial workaround (use intel IGP or go buy and AMD graphics card) do not work when you don't just manage your one PC but actually maintain a system that is produced in series...

And honestly being upset at nVidia leads nowhere. The architecture of Wayland is complete bullshit to begin with and I'm not sure any other graphic stack of competing systems went that way, EVEN for systems that have a single window manager (well, that's most of other systems... -- so the situation is strangely kind of reversed). So hopefully wlroots will eventually improve the situation or something like that, but is it even convenient to build something that does not link the graphics session to the low level graphics stack with that? I hope it is, because if not, that is hopeless... :/

And I've not even talked about extra deps like Cuda, or the general lead nVidia still have in perf/W and/or perf/price (IMO AMD is close, but no cigar)

The X proto was maybe shit, but at least the general approach did not lead to the kind of insanity we are currently seeing. And people discussing the Death of X when Wayland ecosystem is maybe still 5 years away from decent quality and some reasonable feature completeness... (remoting, anybody? anything good enough for Wine?)

Oh well, we will see...

But I personally don’t care as long as Intel and AMD are available, it’s fine. I see Linux like MacOS, it’s an operating system targeted at a limited set of hardware. As long as you buy within this group 90%+ of the problems with Desktop Linux will go away.

It did take a full year for all the bugs to be sorted out (random kernel panics & freezing), these same bugs were problematic in Windows 10 tho. Neither OS had good platform support for quite some time...

Use "--unsupported-gpu" or "--my-next-gpu-wont-be-nvidia" to bypass the check and allow sway to launch.

--ill-pass.

I understand new cards releasing new features but shouldn’t they at least be backwards compatible via the APIs of the previous generation?

May I suggest you buy an AMD GPU next time around; not only because they didn't try to impose their "standard" (which virtually nobody other than them implements, as far as I can tell) without implementing the de-facto standard interface, hurting their customers' access to Wayland to this day... but also because AMD will probably be better value next time you're in the market for a GPU.

> That last issue could be solved with a reusable library that provided basic compositor functionality for window managers.

Sway is based on such a library! (wlroots) However, again, NVIDIA has made it an extra effort to support their GPUs (both in applications and in compositors), and I'm not sure anyone wants to go to extra effort to support a vendor who actively impedes development. By all means, if you want to do NVIDIA's job, be my guest.

I think Sir_Cmpwn has a point in not putting in that effort though.

This doesn't help anyone. I bought an expensive Nvidia GPU 6 years ago, when AMD support on Linux was really bad. What do I do, throw out a perfectly good powerful graphics card and spend another $500 to satisfy the needs of some newfangled software which doesn't solve any of my problems?

I've had 6 years to experience the horrors of Nvidia, on multiple machines. I'm never going to buy one of their cards again unless there's a massive change in their leadership. But telling people 'tough luck; basic functionality that your computers have been capable of doing for decades will no longer work because you bought the wrong brand' is simply unacceptable.

If you want to replace a card which was expensive six years ago, you can spend a hell of a lot less than five hundred dollars to do so. Even a brand-new RX 570, which will outperform a GTX 770 (the highest performance GPU for $500USD or less in 2013), should only cost you about $130USD today. If you're okay with pre-owned cards, you can get better than that for the same money.

> This doesn't help anyone.

It helps people who are in the market for a new GPU, who want it to work well with Linux, especially the cutting-edge stuff.

Even in 2013 though, I think I was able to run Wayland on a discrete AMD GPU (Terascale 2 or 3?) with at least OpenGL 3.3 available; and it worked OK. I don't think AMD got that working more recently than 2013.

I can understand not wanting AMD's cards on the top end as ca. 2013 (since they were not competitive, IIRC), but now they do have competitive offerings, and their support for desktop Linux is incomparably better, which is why I suggest people go with them.

I don't get why I'm getting flak here.

1 the expensive(this is relative) card works fine, do I throw it or donate it without any good reason(switching to wayland could wait IMO until this card is too obsolete)

2 Buying a new GPU is a big investment for some people,those money could be used to replace an old low quality display or other stuff.

No, I'm not missing these points. It's just that nobody except NVIDIA can do anything about that, so I'm suggesting things you could do. If you can't get an AMD or Intel or Qualcomm (unofficial) or Broadcom (or soon ARM) GPU, and you won't (or can't, again because of NVIDIA being antisocial) run Nouveau instead of the NVIDIA proprietary drivers, and you're not willing to port wlroots to EGLStreams, then you simply will not be running wlroots-based compositors on your machine. That's just how it is.

If you bought a 2019 MBP hoping to run Linux with full support for all the hardware, you would be making a mistake; just because I say that it's a mistake, doesn't mean I think you can afford to replace all your computers again once you've made that mistake.

I don't get these replies. I go to specific effort to couch everything I say, I say "next time around", I say "if possible"; and everyone reads it as though I'm somehow out of touch with the fact that not everyone can spend hundreds of dollars on GPUs every year. I know, I'm just saying that steering clear of NVIDIA in the future is an option that will give you a good experience with standard Wayland compositors.

Sure when I will need to buy a new card I will again have to check what is the best one for Linux and then I will probably get an AMD card again( I had AMD before NVIDIA on desktop and Laptop and back then it was a big disappointment, including the fact the AMD Catalyst drop support for my 1 year old cheap Laptop)

My advice is: Unless you're running a qualified application on a workstation GPU, do not use Catalyst (or whatever they're calling it this year). It is almost always more finnicky. Mesa has the best performance, and the most meaningful features for OpenGL, Vulkan, and D3D9 for any any GCN 1 or later (and probably r600 or later, but I don't have personal experience with that) GPU. AMD staffs people to maintain Mesa, including for GPUs they do not support their proprietary driver on; and if you're running a fresh/rolling-release distro, you'll tend to have a great out-of-the-box experience with Mesa.

I know that now AMD open source is better and my new computer will probably run an AMD CPU and an AMD GPU but until my current PC gets outdated I will have to continue use my NVIDIA 970 which is still a decent card for cashual gaming

You've completely missed the point. The horrors are in compatibility. NVIDIA chooses to make it difficult for their customers to use their hardware with new applications, and they hold back the whole ecosystem. In addition to the topic at hand (Wayland), their release model holds back Linux kernel releases when their driver becomes incompatible with the upstream kernel because it is not maintained there.

If you just want to run whatever boring applications NVIDIA chooses to allow you to run, congratulations! Go enjoy your "experience", and play it "the way it's meant to be played"! :- )

> among other things I remember are really bad Linux drivers (proprietary or otherwise)

You're living about seven years in the past.

If I wrote an X compositor that supported NVIDIA's proprietary interface, it would work with pretty much every window manager that's ever been written.

If I patch wlroots to support NVIDIA, I'll still only be able to use window managers based on wlroots; I won't be able to use ones that spun the Wheel of Incompatible Wayland Compositor Libraries and landed on Weston, swc, Orbment, or whatever GNOME uses instead.

Having different compositors at the level they're at allows a lot more interesting innovations to be made, and aside from NVIDIA's tomfoolery, it has not caused significant inconsistency. Everyone uses libinput, almost everyone uses colord, and everyone implements GBM.

Wayland is substantially different from X, and the ways in which it is different are good. NVIDIA did the one thing we needed people not to do.

To be honest though, NVIDIA engineers do not spend any time engineering graphics stacks at all; they write graphics drivers for stacks that are already largely specified. They're really good at shipping hundreds of megabytes of dirty hack code to patch popular shaders from ISVs to run slightly faster on their hardware, and probably great at writing shader compilers and threaded GL drivers.

Or wait until Intel will release a new GPU next year, it should work well with upstream too.

Nvidia has no interest in making their cards play well with Linux, so just avoid them completely to keep your sanity and don't waste your time trying to work around their mess.

Going forward, DE / compositor developers will support Nvidia use case less and less (due to Nvidia market share taking a further dip on Linux and Nvidia still not upstreaming their driver). So save yourself the trouble already today.

This is just not true. Gnome with Wayland is one of the most popular and modern DEs and it supports Nvidia's proprietary drivers today.

While Gnome developers bent under Nvidia's pressure, other compositor developers aren't interested in accommodating exceptions for blobs and wasting their resources on that.

TL;DR: just ditch Nvidia and forget about all their horrors. They really have no place in Linux ecosystem today, because of their refusal to upstream their drivers and because of preventing Nouveau from doing it for them.

1) top performance available on the market;

2) off-the-shelf passive cooled 4K capable cards (GT 1030);

3) (significantly) better performance per watt and less noise for high-end cards.

I still prefer AMD for their play-nice attitude with Linux and seemingly better track record on behaviour towards consumers, but Nvidia for the last years have been offering better hardware.

[1] https://www.gamersnexus.net/hwreviews/3330-gt-1030-ddr4-vs-g...

> top performance available on the market;

Not anymore with new Navi cards. And competition in the Linux market will probably get even stronger with Intel releasing new GPUs with open drivers next year. I.e. there will be no reason to buy Nvidia anymore with all the blob downsides that aren't going to disappear.

> off-the-shelf passive cooled 4K capable cards (GT 1030);

For gaming 4K is really a read herring today, and for regular non gaming desktop use case, you don't need strong GPUs even for 4K.

> (significantly) better performance per watt and less noise for high-end cards.

Also not anymore with Navi.

So I'd say things today look pretty bad for Nvidia on Linux, and they'll be gradually losing Linux desktop market, until they will start playing nice with upstream. Time will tell if they actually will. I don't think they care though. And neither Linux users would care to use them.

My parent commenter did not refer to Sway, that's why I rejected the claim that AMD is the "only way for you to get a usable desktop with modern features".

> even Gnome can't handle XWayland with Nvidia today. And if you play games, especially in Wine, that's still a requirement

I'm not sure what you're referring to. I've successfully launched and played Wine games with Nvidia proprietary drivers in Gnome with Wayland.

How exactly, when it's not supported: https://wiki.gnome.org/Initiatives/Wayland/NVIDIA

    There is currently no accelerated GLX support when
    running a GNOME Wayland session no top of the NVIDIA
    drivers, meaning X11 OpenGL applications will use
    software rendering.

On the contrary, Nvidia drivers have bad reputation of violating OpenGL spec left and right. Mesa is a lot more strict about OpenGL compliance.

And they don't have Vulkan advantage either. Don't use Windows if you need good quality OpenGL.

Wayland has some good ideas to modernize the stack based on passing GPU buffers between the compositor and applications, so that applications can use GPU acceleration and actual 21st century graphics technology to the fullest. But the non-graphics part of a desktop GUI are hard (e.g. event routing, clipboard, drag and drop, screenshots/capturing...). Wayland suffers from two things in this regard: first, it needs to catch up to a 30 year headstart thatball other DEs have with implememting that. Second, it is artificially hobbling itself by declaring absolutely trivial information privileged like the screen resolution and absolute coordinates of any window on the screen. This is a list of stumbling blocks and showstoppers that have to be worked around.