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Comment by coffeecat | Hacker News Reader

I do GPGPU work and I require the proprietary nvidia driver, which I use only for CUDA computations. I'm also excited about wayland, would like to start using sway as my daily driver, and have even considered contributing. However, your attitude, and the comments you make about nvidia users, makes me feel completely unwelcome in the sway/wlroots/wayland community (despite using an Intel GPU for graphics!). Am I correct in this perception, and do you believe your attitude positively affects the health of your projects?

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Nvidia provides good support for CUDA on Linux, but not good support for graphics on Linux. You recognize this, and use a different brand GPU for graphics. The Nvidia users that Sir_Cmpwn is frustrated with are those that think that the same GPU should be good for both tasks, and that everyone working on graphics do all the extra work to adapt to the whims of Nvidia engineers who don't care about their graphics use-cases.

The comment that Sir_Cmpwn was replying to litterally said "Nvidia is absolutely the only option, and it is everything else that has to adapt to it." Now that is the harmful attitude. Because you use Nvidia for CUDA doesn't mean that you need to use Nvidia for graphics. If you do choose to use Nvidia for graphics (despite a clear compatibility warning from the community), you shouldn't demand the graphics people to bend-over-backwards and "[have] to adapt to [Nvidia]."

And you, coffeecat, don't seem to demand that.

It's one thing to tell users to get lost, if they are making unreasonable demands (or any demands at all, for that matter). It's another thing to make vitriolic, divisive comments about all (not some) nvidia users, or to ban all users of proprietary drivers from an issue tracker.

I am not demanding anything, I just think that this attitude is unproductive and harms adoption and never wins. This is why Linux, which okays using firmware blobs and adapts to hardware, is the OSS champion, and Hurd is vaporware.

Wayland isn't refusing to support Nvidia for ideological reasons, they're refusing to support Nvidia for pragmatic reasons. It's not "ideologically, we'd like to be able to modify the Nvidia blob", it's "pragmatically, we'd need to make this specific change to the Nvidia blob to make it work".

You're correct that Nvidia proprietary driver users are unwelcome. We lay this out explicitly in our GitHub issue template, in fact. If you use that Intel GPU instead we'll get along swimmingly.

So you are feeling self-righteous and looking down on people who have the wrong hardware?

Hardware that is wrong, because the (market dominant) company behind it, does not make a open-source driver?

I mean, you do realize, that Open-Source is sadly not the norm and rather something very odd to traditional industries?

So to people who do not worship the GPL(or even heard of it and just want their software to work), you might be a bit offputting. Which might not be the way to increase the significance of Open Source. Which is a bit sad. Because I love OS and yes I know about the GPL etc. - but even I am put of by that arrogance and ignorance. So I am not saying you need to support X or whatever, but maybe do not direct your hate of Nvidia to the users of Nvidia. Maybe they are even new to this. Because those would then just shake their head and go away, (back to windows). Hurray.

There is a difference between not supporting something and actively trying to sabotage it at every turn.

Nvidia doesn’t try to sabotage OS. They just don’t want to support existing APIs that the rest of the OS community uses, because they already have a similar API, readily available for everyone. The same problem is with Wayland developers — they already have an API that Intel and AMD agreed to use, and they do not want to make a special case for Nvidia. These kind of questions are resolved by asking oneselves who is having greater adoption — Nvidia or Wayland.

I do use the Intel GPU for all things graphical. But as I stated, I require the proprietary nvidia driver as well. Your issue policy is "If the nvidia module is loaded on your system, you are not permitted to file bugs of any sort" (https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/3039). From this, I can only infer that your attitude is to childishly exclude a large segment of users (owners of optimus laptops) on whose hardware free drivers are loaded, but who also have some use (which is none of sway/wlroot's concern) for their second nvidia GPU.

You should actually read the comment that was linked in that issue as well:

> [...] if using hybrid graphics where the primary is Intel and the secondary is nvidia, sway would continue to work (just without nvidia monitors) and the user would never see the log message. Then they're likely to create issues related to outputs not working, causing us to invest time in troubleshooting it, only to find that they are using nvidia and never saw the warning."

So yes, you can run sway with the nvidia module loaded, just please unload it and test again before you report bugs.

  > So yes, you can run sway with the nvidia module loaded, just please unload it and test again before you report bugs.

If that were the language used in the issue tracker, then fine. It's sensible to request that users reproduce the bug with the proprietary driver blacklisted before reporting. But the attitude they're projecting is hostile and unconstructive. The bug tracker says:

  > If you are using the nvidia proprietary driver for any reason, you have two choices:
  >
  > 1. Uninstall it and use nouveau instead
  > 2. Use X11+i3 and close your browser tab
  >
  > If `lsmod | grep nvidia | wc -l` shows anything other than zero, your bug report is not welcome here.

Furthermore, sway's behavior is to check whether the proprietary driver is loaded and, if so, exit unless sway is started with the flag --my-next-gpu-wont-be-nvidia. It's hostile, childish, and very off-putting to a potential user and contributor.

Technically, I think that they can do that. That’s what the fork button is for. However, if they are willing to alienate graphics enthusiasts, they wouldn’t be getting any respect.

I don’t want to settle for Intel GPU, because I have a clearly superior GPU available (Nvidia). I don’t want to settle for X, because I have a clearly superior API available (Wayland). I have a 4k OLED display, because if it is there, why settle for something worse? I realize that enthusiasts are rare, but it’s us who help iron out the bugs for the newest hardware, and it is sad to see such an alienating attitude from fellow cutting-edge developers.

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