No, I don't think they can really fork it. How are they going to get support for new hardware in their fork?

Hardware can be abstracted away by a hypervisor, as it's already done in most use-cases since a significant amount of machines are just cloud VMs nowadays. The only API the "hardware" has to implement is VirtIO (which real hardware could also start implementing if needed).

This kind of fork would of course mean death to the Linux desktop, since the only reason the Linux desktop is relevant and (somewhat) modern is because it's enjoying the improvements that are made to Linux by companies who primarily use it on servers.

If this fork happens, this VM-based distro is what enterprises will switch to and build upon, with conventional Linux being relegated to niche use-cases with much less activity and manpower.

Lol, what do you think runs those hypervisors, macOS and Windows...?

There are already VM/container-focused distributions (Alpine etc). There is no real ecosystem fork and likely never will be.

Nvidia is the default option because it's convenient at all levels of the stack. Close to two decades of investment into CUDA made sure that GPGPU with Nvidia is extremely smooth, and AMD support is a lot more spotty and less maintained. But add arbitrary restrictions like needing some outdated kernel or a special distro, and suddenly getting an AMD card to work with your favorite framework doesn't seem like so much more work. And once that reaches critical mass and patches are upstreamed, the convenience advantage of Nvidia is gone and competition will get a lot more fierce.

> making the situation worse for desktop Linux users and consumers

Most desktop Linux users don't need NVIDIA even a little, because AMD's GPUs will serve them just fine. They're not doing AI.

And a decade ago most users didn't need a GPU at all because they weren't doing 3D. I still have a laptop with a Vista compatibility card in it that was outdated on release because the push for using GPU accelerated graphic back ends didn't stop at the OS and everyone's grandparents also wanted to have a look at things like google earth and street view.

If and when everyone is running AI workloads, then all of the competition will need to have proper support for it.

Or at least we hope Nvidia wouldn't be left as the only vendor of modern GPUs in that case. That would be very unfortunate.

There’s this bubble where people who work with AI seem to assume that everyone else also wants to work with AI on their PC. It’s strange. Let NVIDIA have their CUDA and their datacenter GPUs, most of us just want to put pixels on a screen.

You greatly underestimate amount of work that would be needed to hard fork and maintain Linux kernel (even powerhouse like Google doesn’t do it, and they’ve build multiple operating systems), in a state that would be attractive to AI, where you care a lot about performance, latest drivers (for thing like networking cards and other bleeding edge stuff that comes with AI gold rush).

And willingness of others to follow. NVIDIA needs Linux to sell their HW. For Linux NVIDIA isn’t even 1% of their market.

But can NVIDIA maintain a patchset that just removes these new protections from the kernel instead of a complete fork?

Possibly. But I think from the legal point of view it could be much more direct “I’m doing this to break the license” approach, where it can viewed as them try to freeload off up to date work. For older version they had some possible explanation that they just used an API.

INAL.