Now that the majority of their revenue is from data centers instead of Windows gaming PCs, you'd think their relationship with Linux should improve or already has.

It's possible. I haven't had a system completely destroyed by Nvidia in the last few years, but I've been assuming that's because I've gotten in the habit of just not touching it once I get it working...

I got similar experience. I really prefer switch CUDA version with whole PC machine. What is more, the speed and memory of hardware improves quickly in time as well.

I update drivers regularly. I've only had one display failure and was solved by a simple rollback. To be a bit fair (:/) it was specifically a combination of new beta driver and a newer kernel. It's definitely improved a ton since 10 years ago I just would not update them except very carefully.

I've bricked multiple systems just running apt install on the Nvidia drivers. I have no idea how, but I run the installation, everything works fine, and then when I reboot I can't even boot.

That was years ago, but it happened multiple times and I've been very cautious ever since.

Interesting. I've never had that issue (~15 years experience) but I always had CPUs with graphics drivers. Do you think that might be it? The danger zone was always at `startx` and never before. (I still buy CPUs with graphics drivers because I think it is always good to have a fallback and hey, sometimes I want to sacrifice graphics for GPU compute :)

I have been having a fine time with a 3080 on recent Arch, FWIW.

HDR support is still painful, but that seems to be a Linux problem, not specific to Nvidia.

Nvidia segments its big iron AI hardware from the consumer/prosumer segment. They do this by forbidding the use of GeForce drivers in datacenters[1]. All that to say, it is possible for the H100 to to have excellent Linux support, while support for the 4090 is awful.

1. https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/nvidia-updates-ge...

They have been making real improvements the last few years. Most of their proprietary driver code is in firmware now, and the kernel driver is open-source[1] (the userland-side is still closed though).

They've also significantly improved support for wayland and stopped trying to force eglstreams on the community. Wayland+nvidia works quite well now, especially after they added explicit sync support.

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

>complicated

... as in remember the time a ransomware hacker outfit demanded they release the drivers or else .....

https://www.webpronews.com/open-source-drivers-or-else-nvidi...

Because red hat announced that next RHEl is going tone Wayland only, that why they fixed all that you said, they don't care about users, only servers

  > Nvidia's relationship with Linux has been... complicated.

For those unfamiliar with Linus Torvalds' two-word opinion of Nvidia:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=OF_5EKNX0Eg

Wow. Torvalds' distaste for Nvidia from that, albeit 12 year old, clip leaves little to the imagination. Re: gaming GPUs, Windows is their main OS, but is that the main reason why Huang only mentioned Windows in his CES 2025 keynote? Their gaming chips are a small portion of the company now. But they want to focus dev on Windows??

Nvidia has its own Linux distribution, DGX OS, based on Ubuntu LTS.

The Digits device runs the same nVidia DGX OS (nVidia custom Ubuntu distro) that they run on their cloud infra.