> NVIDIA doesn't support GBM
If Nvidia don't support it, how much of a useful standard can it really be?
If Nvidia don't support it, how much of a useful standard can it really be?
(In principle GBM isn't quite a single-implementation Mesa only standard - third party implementations are possible, though the only one that exists right now is by ARM for their newer Mali GPUs. People seem to have had mixed results with it and I'm not sure it's even intended to run desktop Wayland.)
FreeBSD 12.0 has Linux DRM 4.16 code (April 2018), while -current has Linux DRM 5.0 code (March 2019).
OpenBSD -current (next release) has Linux 4.19 DRM code (October 2018, LTS), with initial AMDGPU backports from 4.20 (AMD Picasso & Raven 2 support).
Adding that their proprietary drivers are not particularly good, NVIDIA is not a very popular choice for a Linux machine.
Just remember that it took them almost a decade to add KMS support.
You could vote with your wallet but there aren't enough Linux users to move anyone's needles as far as gpus.
Well, for server and ML payloads, we are the vast majority. Things like Google Stadia is certainly enough to move needles, and if AMD ends up able to compete in ML with future products, then we'd be able to make a huge dent in NVIDIA revenue.
GBM works just fine, they've simply chosen not to support it.
And Xorg supported them for decades before using Xinerama. Instead of collaborating with upstream, they just dumped something incompatible and broken, and said "Deal with it".
Doing what everyone else does != doing it properly
> I wouldn't call this excellent at all
So far Wayland support is most further in Gnome and even there a lot of features are still missing/broken despite Wayland being well over a decade old at this point. A lot of very basic features (remote desktop, screen sharing, exclusive fullscreen, keyboard/mouse shortcuts) are still in their infancy. Not to mention both Gnome and KDE have implemented their Wayland compositor inside the shell process so now a compositor crash means you lose all your open apps which hasn't been a problem in Linux for decades.
Wayland and its current limitations have nothing to do with, and does not excuse neither, nvidia's non-compliant implementation.
- remote desktop: good point. Considering that screen recordings work fine, I don't see a technical reason that a Wayland remote desktop setup couldn't work.
- exclusive fullscreen: what do you mean by this? Using Firefox, F11 and Super-F both work in Sway and F11 works with GNOME.
- keyboard/mouse shortcuts: maybe? The fact that a random process can no longer read all of your keystrokes seems like a plus, to me. Otherwise, just add a shortcut to your window manager or DE and run a command of your choice.
- losing all apps on compositor restart: Only an issue with GNOME and KDE. Pressing Super-Shift-C on Sway reloads the compositor and not your apps.
It is a plus, unless you write software that allows for global keyboard/mouse shortcuts (which I have done). In which case it is just a huge pain in the ass to not have it, and then hearing from some developers that you can just "add a shortcut to your window manager" is incredibly frustrating. It's not like you can trust an average end-user to actually do so, even the ones that do run linux. Then you will get complained at for not having functionality that existed at some point in the past.
Or perhaps their marvelous installation methods of running a random script as root that rewrites configuration files, and its configuration interface that likewise also rewrites configuration files in attempts to get multi-monitor setups working that until recently hardly ever worked?
Maybe you are referring to their magnificent support, forcing you to stay on outdated kernels as upgrading would break compatibility and render you without a functioning graphics adapter short of a VGA-resolution framebuffer console?
It could also be their fantastic backwards compatibility, requiring you to keep track of driver series compatible with certain adapters, where every other GPU in existence just works OOB.
I used NVIDIA up until a 2 years back. While you could arguably get things to work, claiming they had excellent support is laughable at best.
Furthermore lag time for supporting newest kernel normally lags what 30 days?
In brief what you are describing is self inflicted wounds.
Anyone can come up with a standard in isolation. Getting the relevant people on board and able and willing to support it is the useful bit.
Did they say they'd support it? If they never said they did it seems unfair to criticise. Are you going to support my graphics standard that I just made up?
Except gaming is not that "niche":
1.35 billion PCs worldwide - https://www.statista.com/statistics/610271/worldwide-persona...
47M active daily and 90M monthly users for steam https://www.pcgamer.com/steam-now-has-90-million-monthly-use...
You can think of any number of fantasy scenarios that would make one of the biggest GPU vendors care about your standards, but sadly that is not the world we live in. The world we live in is one where Nvidia has the best game support on the market (far, far better than AMD - let's not even think about Intel here) and therefore anyone who still plays games on a PC will own one of them unless they are some sort of AMD advocate.
At the end of the day, nobody wants to be reading "we don't support this because they're not nice to us". That's going straight back to the linux dark ages of 15 years ago, where you needed to care about all sorts of weird and arcane details to get a functioning desktop system.
They aren't pretending they support Linux, BSD, Solaris, Mac, Windows for a decade after each card is released.
While this was true ATI/amd were shipping garbage that barely worked for a few years. This has only changed in recent years.
We are a few years having one dedicated gpu maker in the fold and are already talking about using your massive 2% marketshare to strong arm the other. You could afford to be more humble and less entitled.
I'm just observing that Redhat is the trendsetter and if they say X is legacy, that makes it so. Unless Nvidia or Nvidia customers decide to pick up where Redhat is leaving off and pay for developers to work on X, but I sincerely doubt that's going to happen.
Unless Nvidia decides to support the new system, they can't plausibly claim to support the linux desktop. I just hope whatever happens will result in less online whining from linux-using Nvidia customers.
If nobody picks up the slack, the paths ahead seems pretty clear. Either Nvidia produces a proper driver, or their support for the Linux desktop can be classified as legacy at best. Feeling upset about this situation doesn't change the nature of it.
The solution has been presented, and they reject it.
The only people who suffer are the people we write software for. Maybe that doesn't matter to you, because you write software only for people like you. That's fair. It matters to me though.
It doesn't matter who the ones "suffering" are. What do you expect to do, convince me of the moral necessity of supporting nvidia cards so that I turn back time and devote my life to reverse engineering GPUs and implementing FOSS drivers? That can't happen. I don't have the power to support nvidia cards, only Nvidia has that power, and they seem to have no interest in exercising it. It doesn't matter if you convince me that nvidia card support is more important that curing child cancer; the situation remains unchanged. To change the situation you must convince nvidia, complaining to anybody else about it is a waste of your time.