Drew wrote a blog entirely devoted to the Nvidia issue: https://drewdevault.com/2017/10/26/Fuck-you-nvidia.html
Unfortunately, Wayland is dead in the water until it can run on Nvidia machines, and no amount of blog posts will change that.
if people on HN don't know or care on something like this (I didn't, and I don't), then good luck telling less HN-y people about wayland being the protocol and not the implementation.
I'm annoyed at myself for this very comment, but somehow, somebody (many people), somewhere messed up the messaging around these things.
Then it becomes a question of whether GNOME/KDE have feature parity between X11 & wayland. Then other compositors can go about implementing the interfaces they've setup to be GNOME or KDE compatible
Can't say he isn't straightforward. If you bought your computer without thinking about running Linux on it, or if you're looking to install Linux on an employer-supplied Windows laptop, there's an excellent chance you're a shitty consumer that he doesn't want using his software.
What I haven't considered is whether NVIDIA's Linux drivers might be implementing a particular graphics stack interface differently so that implementing Wayland on top of it becomes a PITA for some developers (not that GNOME and KDE didn't compromise to implement it anyways for users' sake). That does not make me a "shitty consumer", there is no way even a cautious consumer can take things like "GBM vs EGLStreams" fully into account every time.
Reading OP, I figured it was righteously angry. Reading your article, I’m now figuring he’s just angry and abrasive. The OP article reads hypocritical after reading yours.
>so he writes an article about people being assholes about him not writing free extra stuff
I did write that extra free stuff, and I'm arguing that some people are being assholes because they perpetuate the lie that I didn't do the free work, and because feature "foo" doesn't work, project bar must be bad. But feature "foo" does work, and using that falsehood to say project "bar" is bad is a dick move. This is the "horseshit" that's pissing me off.
The Nvidia issue is different: Nvidia goes out of their way to prevent their hardware from being used for this purpose. For example, they use signed firmwares that we simply cannot use for implementing the features we need, relying on cryptography to lock us out of their platform unless we use their driver. Then that driver doesn't support what we need. Nvidia deliberately prevents us from putting in the effort. They have created an artificial monpoloy on the required labor, then refuse to do it.
The other side of things is what I see differently. When folks are saying wayland isn’t ready, or even that it sucks, I mostly see them as referring to the ecosystem, not wayland itself. It’s an unfortunate quirk of language. Because foo doesn’t work, the bar ecosystem is currently bad.
On the nvidia side, I’m not going to engage further with you on that because you called me a shitty consumer and that pisses me off. Fuck me, you don’t want me in your userbase anyways, right?
I've spent the last few months doing GPGPU stuff on Nvidia Jetson devices and my experience has been the complete opposite. I've rarely seen something with such bad support and documentation.
Unfortunately… I'm not a hobbyist, I'm not tinkering and the aforementioned repositories are… about it. There is little documentation about
- how to build a custom OS image (necessary if you're thinking about using Jetson as part of your own product, i.e. a large-scale deployment). Ideally, I would like to do that as part of a CI/CD workflow. What proprietary drivers and libraries do I need to install? Nvidia basically says, here's our custom Ubuntu image with the usual GUI, complete driver stack and everything – take it or leave it. Unfortunately, the GUI alone is eating up a lot of the precious CPU and GPU resources, so using their OS image in production is no option for me.
- how deployment works on production modules (as opposed to the non-production module in the Developer Kit)
- what production modules are available in the first place ("Please refer to our partners")
- what wifi dongles are compatible (the most recent Jetson Nano comes w/o wifi)
- how to convert your custom models to TensorRT, what you need to pay attention to etc. (The official docs basically say: Have a look at the following nondescript sample code. Good luck.)
- how do I automize testing of TensorRT models & code? Why isn't there a compatibility layer which allows executing my models on non-Jetson devices / on a CPU (obviously at lower performance, but I don't mind).
- … (I'm sure I'm forgetting many other things that I've struggled with over the past months)
Anyway. It's not that this information isn't out there somewhere in some blog post, some obscure Github repo or some thread on the Nvidia forums[2]. (Though I have yet to find a wifi dongle that works reliably…) But it usually takes you days or weeks to find it. From a product which is supposed to be industry-grade I would have expected more.
[0]: https://github.com/dusty-nv/jetson-inference
[1]: https://github.com/jkjung-avt/tensorrt_demos
[2]: https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/c/agx-autonomous-machine...
I see so many conflicting stories about how well AMD GPUs behave and perform on Linux. Some new, many old. Some even as extreme as "I bought a new AMD GPU and there are no drivers for it yet". Furthermore for Blender specifically AMD seems to get the short stick in performance.
Really leaves me confused as to what to buy. Just venting.
Basically I would say it doesn't work.
Wayland is 10 years old, and extremely stable. If it isn't working properly it's either your driver vendor or your desktop environment that is to blame.
How much of the market share is Nvidia? A stupid quick search's top result says 80%. So 80% of PCs can't run Wayland?
To be clear, i know nothing of compositors/etc, I've had nothing but problems with Xorg, and i want to use Wayland. _and yet_ - it seems like there is not a single PC in my house, or any of my family, that can run Wayland.
I'm happy to accept your statement of where the blame lies. But if you're telling me Nvidia can't run Wayland currently.. does it matter to the end user? When "Most PCs" can't run Wayland his statement of "precious use-case" seems off base.
No. 80% of PCs cannot run Sway. Both Mutter (GNOME) and KWin (KDE Plasma) implement support for EGLStreams for the Nvidia driver. However, EGLStreams itself is inherently quirky and kind of broken, per Nvidia themselves. They're working on moving to DMA-BUF to fix this, and at least on the KDE side, are committing to replacing the implementation in KWin to use that once the driver is updated to use it.
No.
Long-term Nvidia share is about ~18%, AMD ~12% and Intel ~70%. But that's for the entire market, and since Windows gamers are skewing toward Nvidia, that makes the rest to make up the percentage.
So 80% not being able to run Wayland due to being Nvidia is grossly incorrect.
> it seems like there is not a single PC in my house, or any of my family, that can run Wayland.
Huh, here at work and also privately all can run Wayland just fine; just always had issues with NVIDIA, so we would see it exactly the opposite way. We vote with our wallets and strictly prefer AMD or Intel GPUs, as they both play much better with Linux and open source in general (could always get better, though).
Note also that on Linux the market share from AMD increased from ~25% to ~40% over the course of the last two years[0], and those do not seem to be short-lived effects, and the ratio may well tip over in favour to AMD soon in the Linux world.
So yes, if you want to run Linux with a modern Graphic stack you will need to buy a GPU from a different vendor than NVIDIA. At least if hell freezes not over, and they put off their backwards bent attitude against open source drivers.
If you do not want that then fine, use your NVIDIA card, but don't expect people to put in any extra work just because NVIDIA always want to be a special snowflake; seemingly putting in extra effort to produce as much extra work as just possible to support it.
[0]: https://boilingsteam.com/amd-vs-nvidia-are-linux-gamers-swit...
That's not at all what GP is saying. They're saying that X handles their use case, and Wayland doesn't, and that most end users won't care about who's fault that is.
A lot of the criticism of Wayland comes from uninformed jerks who want to trash the protocol over stuff that isn't a real problem, but there is also a bit of reflexive lashing out that comes from Wayland advocates. GP is just saying they can't switch to Wayland until the ecosystem around it matures. That's not an attack, you don't have to take it personally.
> you will need to buy a GPU from a different vendor than NVIDIA
I run a 4K monitor on my desktop with an ~6 year old NVidia graphics card. I run modern software on that machine, I watch movies, I run games, I do 4K art, I even boot into Blender occasionally. I'm not seeing significant slowdown or framerate problems as long as I use NVidia's proprietary drivers in X. But on Nouveau, it's unusable. Who's fault is that? Probably NVidia's! But it doesn't matter, my computer currently works well, I have no plans to upgrade in the immediate future, and this was put together during a period where NVidia was very clearly the sensible choice for anyone who cared about Linux graphics performance.
It's reasonable for people to use older hardware, and it's reasonable for them to want that hardware to work well. We're not talking about people running 32 bit OSes or something, not everybody upgrades their graphics card every 2 years, and it's not really feasible for the surrounding Wayland ecosystem to only target the people who do.
I don't have a proposal for that, I'm not saying anybody has to do anything. I'm actively rooting for Wayland, I do think it is the future. But I'm also describing why I don't run Wayland on my Arch setup and why I don't recommend it to people who ask me about getting into the more technical side of Linux. If someone wants to take even that as some kind of anti-Wayland screed instead of as a completely neutral, factual representation of the current state of the world and the Wayland ecosystem, then that's their problem, not mine.
There's this thing I'm seeing where anyone bringing up these issues just gets asked, "well, what's your suggestion? You want to force developers to do X?" I'm not suggesting anything! I'm describing why I don't use Wayland on my desktop. That's it, that's the only thing I'm doing. I don't know how to solve the problem, but the problem exists, even if it's not your fault.
Only the first group is the problem, and I think noone is bothered by the second.
I'm extremely sympathetic to this argument, and I actually agree with ddevault's decision not to support NVidia in Sway. I think as an Open Source maintainer you don't have an obligation to burn yourself out solving a problem that is NVidia's fault, and we need real pressure on NVidia to stop being completely awful.
However.
Linux is at the point where I am able to start recommending it to ordinary people, and even technical people who are used to Windows. One the selling points I use is that a lot of hardware "just works" in Linux. NVidia is not ddevault's problem to solve, but people buy NVidia cards, and regardless of who's fault it is, if someone walks up to me and asks about switching to Linux or using a tiling window manager, I am not going to have a conversation with them about graphics cards. I'm going to point them towards X-compatible software that gets good performance regardless of their graphics card.
Doesn't mean it's anyone's fault that I can't recommend Wayland to everyone, but I can't recommend Wayland to everyone.
And I am on the Wayland hype train. I don't like X11, I want to run Wayland. In most cases, I would be defending Wayland right now. But if one of the conditions of switching over is "buy a new graphics card", if it's "redo all of your linux-wacom setup"[0], if it's running an entire embedded X session just to get Emacs working[1], if it's that common applications just don't work right now, then that's not ready for prime time. Those aren't problems that the Wayland devs can fix, but until they get fixed, I just can't in good conscience tell people that the Wayland ecosystem is mature and ready for regular usage.
The moment I have to talk to someone about throwing out hardware, I'm recommending them to stay on X. I don't care who's to blame, people want software that just works, and I don't feel confident that Wayland just works. I'm not going to recommend every i3 NVidia user throw away their graphics card, that's not a real solution. I sympathize with the devs who are being hounded to solve problems that aren't their responsibility[2], but I also sympathize with the users who are just as much not to blame for any of this. It is also not their problem to solve when they can instead just use an existing stack that works today. They have zero obligation to play Where's Waldo with the maintainers of a dozen projects just to build a working system.
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[0]: Do equivalently powerful tools to linux-wacom even exist for Wayland right now? I can't find out. There's basically zero documentation that exists on this that I can find, compared to an extensive Arch guide about rebinding keys under X11, multiple helpful utilities like xsetwacom that are pretty well documented, and dozens of blog posts and forums that are troubleshooting even obscure issues. That's not a narrow use case, my computer is an art station. I need to know before I switch that my Cintiq will work perfectly, and DuckDuckGo doesn't know the answer to that question.
[1]: Emacs is finally working to get rid of its X dependencies, but it's still not part of the main release, I'd still need to switch to compiling Emacs myself, which... no.
[2]: And I'm also sympathetic to arguments that this just takes time, and as people start to switch more utilities will be written and driver support will get better. But it's taking a really long time. And I don't know where NVidia fits on that spectrum, because I'm not confident that they're going to magically stop being awful any time soon. Maybe someone else will write a compatibility layer around the driver or something? Eventually? Waiting for NVidia to go out of business and their hardware to vanish isn't feasible.
The issue here is that sway, one wayland compositor, does not want to support NVIDIA hardware because they lack manpower. They are also not able to attract anyone willing to implement this support, like other compositors have done.
If you wonder why this is the case, just read this blog post again, and wonder if you'd like to spend your free time working with maintainers that write like this. Go ahead, read any of the other blogpost, or skim through the closed issues in the sway repository.
Trying to spin sway's failure to support NVIDIA's hardware as "NVIDIA hates wayland" is ridiculous in 2021.
FYI I use sway as my main DE, and I'm indeed grateful to its creators and maintainers (ddevault is not a maintainer anymore). But when I read this:
> "We’ve sacrificed our spare time to build this for you for free."
they sound to be entitled to my gratefulness. This is just such a toxic way to go through this world.
TL;DR Theoretically libinput is a linux-wacom replacement.
...
Really? "Us, open source devs demans nvidia to alter their ways". And you wonder why people are disappointed in wayland?
What's your proposal? Requiring paid and free-time spending software developer to bent backward and maintain some complex parallel implementation for EGL-Streams just because NVIDIA always want to be a special snowflake? Even seemingly putting in extra effort to be a PITA for all involved and produce as much extra work as just possible to support it.
With that in mind really nobody can wonder why NVIDIA market share is continuously getting smaller in Linux systems https://boilingsteam.com/amd-vs-nvidia-are-linux-gamers-swit...
Do you thing Nvidia would ignore them, like they ignore Linux?
On some platforms (Mac) they don't have that opportunity at all.
Now that may not be true.. but it seemed clear cut. I wanted to try Wayland really bad because i have a multi-DPI monitor setup, and Xorg is awful at that. Yet, it seemed too early.
Nvidia isn't exactly some niche product. Not exactly a "Precious use-case".