NVIDIA’s main target on Linux is data center cards (Teslas). Desktop is just happen to be supported for the hobbyist market.

This was not like that before their Tesla series took off with such momentum.Currently, X11 and display support is provided at the barely minimum level which doesn’t piss off the people.

I think some parts of their drivers do some black magic, because if that was not the case, there should not be a tug of war about the technical details for providing Wayland support.

Monitor power management and related display parts of the driver break constantly, but not the CUDA parts, because it’s the money making part.

Not sure where you're getting that from. NVIDIA has supported professional desktop Linux usage since before anyone was doing AI on their GPUs. All of their GPUs worked well.

I've been running NVIDIA GPUs on Linux workstations in personal and professional settings for almost 20 years. It's been always been an extremely functional and high performance experience.

It's annoying that the drivers are proprietary, and have to be rebuilt during kernel upgrades, but they have worked very well for a long time.

Same. I have been running on and off Nvidia on Linux for more than 20 years and they have committed to the platform for all this time.

It would of course be better if the drivers where OSS and integrated in the kernel, but for more than a decade Nvidia was the only option for high performance graphics on Linux (Intel always had very good stable OSS drivers but not the hardware to match).

The problem is, not everyone can get the latest and greatest card a couple of years for their desktop system for their workstations.

For AI work, their cards are great, yes. Also for accelerated science. We have quite a few of their cards at the bottom floor, churning out number non-stop.

However, desktop experience with their cards are constantly degrading after Tesla got up to speed. VSync can't be enabled without losing 25% performance hit. DPMS support was broken for 1.5 years on DisplayPort. Then, DisplayPort started to lose link when you turn off your monitor for whatever reason.

These things add-up, and when your card is deprecated you can't move to open drivers even if said drivers have lower performance, it breaks the camel's back.

If you're on the happy path (hardware + software wise), NVIDIA is great, and if you don't, you're too poor for NVIDIA and they can't be bothered.

So no, I'll not be buying NVIDIA card for my desktop use.

Official Nvidia drivers for macOS back when those still existed were second class citizens too. They had a rotating cast of odd bugs you’d never see with the Windows drivers.

Non-Windows desktop users definitely don’t seem to be among Nvidia’s chief concerns.

A factor in this case may be the fact that while desktops remain a very sizeable segment in the PC space in the Mac space an actual traditional desktop is available only as a very high priced workstation which starts at $7000 whereas more traditional users are apt to be served by minis or imacs.

There were probably about 1000x more Linux desktop users than Mac Pro users willing to install their own aftermarket GPU even when this was a thing.

There is another group of macOS users who were buying Nvidia cards: hackintoshers (those who hack macOS to run on generic PCs). For several years, by far the most cost effective, powerful, and flexible “mac” available was one that you built yourself from a selection of known-compatible components. Many in this group were buying Nvidia GPUs for use in these machines since Nvidia was furnishing macOS drivers at that point.

It’s hard to tell how numerous this group was, but I saw them come up surprisingly often in photos and discussions online, even appearing in production environments (despite legal dodginess). Wouldn’t be surprised if at times this is where most Nvidia cards purchased for use with macOS were sold.

To be, frankly, more fair than they deserve, with CUDA they don't have to worry about anyone else. It's their API, they just have to maintain it themselves. When supporting X or Wayland they have to play nice and integrate with other people and their APIs.

They put a ton of effort into supporting the Linux desktop market, all considering.

> Desktop is just happen to be supported for the hobbyist market.

That Linux hobbyist market is barely relevant. Desktop Linux is supported by Nvidia because it is a big thing in the SFX industry.

> NVIDIA’s main target on Linux is data center cards

Linux has been supported before their were data center cards. Before GPU compute was a thing there was workstations which are in fact still a thing.

> Monitor power management and related display parts of the driver break constantly,

In 20 years of usage this appears to be inaccurate. I'm not even 100% sure what your GPU has to do with monitor power management fails which historically consist wholly and only of distros/desktops setting the sleep threshold way to short and whatever half assed hack is being used to keep their machine from turning the monitor off in the middle of their youtube video fails to work properly. The solution as with a lot of over-complicated things is simplicity. Set the threshold far higher and if you actually want the monitor to shut off do so. In any case it again has little to do with your GPU

> X11 and display support is provided at the barely minimum level which doesn’t piss off the people.

Not sure where this is coming from at all. X11 support has pretty much always been great. The most reasonable thing to suppose is that the Linux desktop ecosystem has been historically somewhat fragile especially if you insist on the latest and greatest and that Nvidia due to open source unfriendliness seems to catch a greater than average share of the blame.

Someone will post a random thread on a entirely unrelated matter without even mentioning nvidia and somewhere down thread someone will be blaming Nvidia.

> Well recently my cat got the mange...

>> Are you running NVIDIA? It's known to cause that.

>>> Oh ya I installed NVIDIA recently and my cat is 100% dead!

>>>> My neighbor installed NVIDIA and my cat is now a dog

Look at this singular thread where NVIDIA is assigned the blame for flaky wifi, bluetooth, and display power management.

The driver API in the windows kernel changes about once a decade. And they're not actively hostile to loading closed source drivers.

Poor multi-trillion company unable to support open source drivers

Their business plan seems to be working out for them.

Ok?

Companies won't do anything unless it makes them money, there's no other factor like pride or social pressure. A human might be motivated to change by being looked down upon, but not a corporation.

Who are you trying to argue?

Poor us. The multi-billion dollar company is doing just fine.

Maybe they should contribute their drivers to the kernel instead of fighting it at every turn.

There's always AMD

They are, they released an open driver and it’s being upstreamed into the kernel.

https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules

People still search for reasons to shit on it because they don’t like the company in general and want to back AMD. Nothing is or ever will be good enough for the haters.

http://www.paulgraham.com/fh.html

It's software development, if you're searching for a reason to be discontented, you're always going to find one, it's clearly an unfalsifiable situation for people who just dislike the company on personal grounds.

that driver is not being upstreamed and never will be as long as it can only work with the proprietary userspace. It's being used as a reference implementation to improve nouveau.

I've got nothing against nvidia at all. I just don't like running proprietary software on my computer. Looks like they're finally improving and I'm definitely happy about that. However, the driver has not been upstreamed yet.

I just wish they'd let the nouveau developers do their thing.

You install the Nvidia drivers through your distro package manager. That's worked for me for the past 10 years. In recent years, the driver or some component of it recompiles via dkms whenever you install a new kernel. The Nouveau drivers have never worked for me.

Yeah, I see a lot of people bemoaning the difficulty of installing the nVidia driver on Linux, but in my experience it amounts to clicking a box in the configuration and letting DKMS do its magic. Actually easier than the Windows driver that you have to go to their website and download. Downside is the driver version is usually somewhat behind the Windows version, but that's not been a showstopper for me.

That’s never worked for me other than to maybe get the native monitor res working. Refresh rates are always off and any remotely advanced configuration has never worked with distro drivers.

This is exactly how I borked my Bluetooth and WiFi.

It's really not hard anymore. I've used it for years, since I got rid of my abomination of a Vega64.

AMD drivers are built into the kernel and work out of the box, but they're still buggy. In my experience, at least 3 times I couldn't boot after a kernel upgrade due to buggy Vega64 drivers.

I got used to it back in the days. I would download the driver from Nvidia, make the installer executable. Then drop into run level 3 and run the installer from there. Reboot, and it worked. Every time there was a kernel upgrade I believe you needed to reinstall the drivers, as the Nvidia software installed kmod's. Needless to say, I use ATI cards now. I wonder if Nvidia supported Wayland natively, maybe the installations will go much smoother?

I had a laptop with an ATI card, 2006 to 2013. Then some 3.x kernel dropped the driver and I had to choose between buying a new laptop and stop upgrading the kernel. I stopped the upgrade but no more ATI cards for me after that experience.

Nowadays their Linux support is probably better than nvidia; when I bought my nvidia card, the amdgpu drivers were just starting to be a thing, and the radeon drivers were so bad I went nvidia, and it's been a pain ever since. I recently got wayland working, but to give you an idea of performance, I get 86FPS on glxgears when maximized on my 1200p screen.

Nvidia targets Windows, not Linux. It's as simple as that

They put a lot of work into maintaining a Linux driver, actually.

It seems likely that in the course of installing your gpu driver via your package manager you installed additional updates that effected other functionality. It is plainly impossible for your GPU driver to effect your wifi.

Its been painless to install closed source nvidia drivers for 20 years so long as your distro provides a package.

I can think of a dozen ways for a GPU driver to affect Wireless NIC. They're both kernel mode so good ol' fashioned SW bugs is a start. Then you could have bad firmware tables causing one driver to trample on the wrong device. All the way too the GPU interfering directly on the bus.

If this was so you would be able to trivially reproduce in 60 seconds by rebooting with the in kernel driver in place of the NVIDIA driver. Then you can write a blog post exploring the nature of a bug as likely as you finding out you were the secret love child of Elon Musk and the direct descendant of the Lindbergh baby.

The main difference is probably that Linux has a dozen+ desktops and (even ideally) multiple desktop implementations to support. Windows has just one, and they update it continuously (not to say it works perfectly either).

In the end, Windows has more users that report bugs on fewer setups. That makes fixing things much easier than Linux.

I... Don't think either of those is true? Driver support is once for all of Xorg and once for all of Wayland AFAIK; it's not like you have a different driver for each desktop environment. And I was rather given to believe that Linux users were far disproportionately likely to report bugs compared to Windows users, though I suppose there are so many more Windows users that they might still manage a higher absolute number of bug reports.

I'm amazed no one's posted is yet, so I guess I'll have to do the honors.

"Nvidia, fuck you" - https://youtu.be/i2lhwb_OckQ

And there’s the thought-terminating cliche, like every nvidia thread

It's much simpler on Linux. You just do `# apt install nvidia-driver`, and reboot. That's all.

This also won't install all the horrible security nightmares that come with the Windows drivers, as that stuff doesn't exist on Linux.

So overall a much better experience than on Windows.