Yeah, Wayland is one of the main issue here. Things are going really well generally speaking with the Wayland transition, but Nvidia is single-handedly delaying the wide-spread transition from X to Wayland across most distros, which is super unfortunate, because it's a very important part of a desktop Linux experience. Using Wayland day to day on my XPS 13 with regular Intel integrated graphics is great in terms of perf and battery life. There's a much larger conversation to be had about X vs Wayland, but broadly speaking Wayland is just better and not bogged down by design decisions made 20 or 30 years ago.

The other key benefit would be driver management. Updating your drivers right now can be a nightmare. If the drivers are open sourced and upstreamed into the kernel this becomes a non-issue. I do understand why Nvidia doesn't want to do that though. A lot of their lead right now is not just hardware based, but software based. They have a choke-hold on the ML ecosystem and it's a huge cash cow for them. Giving away that secret sauce in their drivers, so that AMD could make their cards seamlessly compatible would probably be a huge mistake from a business perspective for Nvidia.

> Giving away that secret sauce in their drivers, so that AMD could make their cards seamlessly compatible would probably be a huge mistake from a business perspective for Nvidia.

I've seen this argument a lot but never from the ML perspective - and I don't think it makes sense with ML.

Nivida's advantage is ML is CUDA and cuDNN, and the huge set of tools built on them. These aren't the driver, but a layer above it.

I don't really understand the "secret sauce" argument for the drivers at all, but I assumed it applied to gaming somehow. I can't think of how it applies to ML though.

PTX is on the driver level, and it took NVidia several years effort to make their cards properly map into C++ memory module.

Intel and AMD despite their FOSS support, actually only do open what they feel like.

nvidia drivers work just fine on wayland with kde and gnome, both of which support EGL and GBM.

Weyland still doesn't work with nv drivers, so you get to choose between a reasonable desktop display substrate and full graphics acceleration.

KDE and Gnome Support Nvidia drivers on wayland.

They support nouveau. Wayland doesn't support EGS, no matter what DE you stick in front, so nv drivers are out.

(Nvidia cards have two drivers on Linux, nouveau, the open-source, slow, and incompatible-with-Quadro ones, and NV, the binary blob shipped by Nvidia that people take religious exception to.)

Gnome supports Wayland over EGS just not by default. I tried it out a few months ago and while it "works" it was somewhat buggy and I just went back to X.

Gnome and KDE on Wayland support both EGS and GBM, and they have for a while, so the nvidia binary driver "just works" with either of them.

What's EGS in this context? I'll take it it's not the Epic Game Store, and searching for Wayland EGS only lands on this HN comment.

EGLStreams, one graphics API. The alternative is graphics buffer manager with kernel mode settings.